‘Habermas has been an unflagging defender of both the Enlightenment,

as a pivot in European history, and enlightenment, as an ongoing pro-

cess that transcends towards universality from within local contexts.
He has therefore been accused of Eurocentrism and of using universal-
ism to mask the West’s colonial and imperial ambitions. This second
edition of this pioneering anthology challenges these misunderstand-
ings of Habermas’ work, and the new contributions engage with his
majestic Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie. The book will be indis-
pensable for exploring Habermas’ own challenge to think through and
beyond the (de)provincializing of Western political thought.’
Eduardo Mendieta, Professor of Philosophy, Penn
State University
‘This illuminating collection of essays represents an overdue attempt
to “deprovincialize” Habermas and his contributions to critical theory.
We learn not only how and why Habermas is relevant to the “postna-
tional constellation”, but also why his ideas remain useful for under-
standing the conditions of deep global pluralism. And there is even
some icing on the cake: this second, updated edition includes con-
tributions on Habermas’ most recent philosophical writings. Highly
recommended for both advanced students and those already versed in
contemporary political and social theory.’
William E. Scheuerman, James H. Rudy Professor of
Political Science, Indiana University
‘This excellent collection marks a milestone in Habermas studies. It
engages with Habermas’ political theory from global perspectives that
extend from post-colonialism and global constitutionalism to demo-
cratic experiments in China and women’s movements in India. At
once knowledgeable, charitable and critical of Habermas, it will be
essential reading for students and scholars alike. The second edition
has been updated with two superb new essays on Auch eine Geschichte
der Philosophie.’
James Gordon Finlayson, Professor of
Social and Political Philosophy and Director
of the Centre for Social and Political
Thought, University of Sussex


Deprovincializing Habermas
T his book provides a rich and systematic engagement with Jürgen
Habermas’ political theory from critical perspectives outside its
Western locus. It constructively examines the theory’s implications
for non-‘Western’ contexts ranging from Latin America and the
Middle East to India and China, and for themes ranging from
cosmopolitanism, democracy and human rights to colonialism,
feminism, care, modernity, and religion. The chapters added to the
second edition explore Habermas’ own recent response to the charge
of ‘provincialism’.
The book will be of special interest to scholars and students of
political theory, global justice, international affairs, philosophy, and
critical theory, and also to those working in postcolonial studies,
religious studies, sociology and cultural studies.

Tom Bailey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Cabot University

in Rome, Italy. His research focuses on contemporary political philoso-
phy, ethics and the history of modern philosophy. He has published
various articles in these areas, and edited Contestatory Cosmopolitanism
(2016/2017) and co-edited Rawls and Religion (2014).
Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political Thought
Series Editors: Aakash Singh Rathore and Sebastiano Maffettone, Center for
Ethics & Global Politics, Luiss University, Rome

Whereas the interrelation of ethics and political thought has been recognized
since the dawn of political reflection, over the last sixty years – roughly
since the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – we have
witnessed a particularly turbulent process of globalizing the coverage and
application of that interrelation. At the very instant the decolonized globe
consolidated the universality of the sovereign nation-state, that sovereignty
– and the political thought that grounded it – was eroded and outstripped,
not as in eras past, by imperial conquest and instruments of war, but rather
by instruments of peace (charters, declarations, treaties, conventions), and
instruments of commerce and communication (multinational enterprises,
international media, global aviation and transport, internet technologies).
Has political theory kept apace with global political realities? Can ethical
reflection illuminate the murky challenges of real global politics?
This Routledge book series Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political
Thought addresses these crucial questions by bringing together outstanding
monographs and anthologies that deal with the intersection of normative
theorizing and political realities with a global focus. Treating diverse topics
by means of interdisciplinary techniques – including philosophy, political
theory, international relations and human rights theories, and global and
postcolonial studies – the books in the Series present up-to-date research
that is accessible, practical, yet scholarly.
Politics and Cosmopolitanism in Global Age
Edited by Sonika Gupta and Sudarsan Padmanabhan
Human Rights in Postcolonial India
Edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi and V.G. Julie Rajan
Religion and Civil Society in the Arab World
In the Vortex of Globalization and Tradition
Edited by Tania Haddad and Elie Al Hindy
Formatting Religion
Across Politics, Education, Media, and Law
Edited by Marius Timmann Mjaaland
International Toleration
A Theory
Pietro Maffettone
What is Pluralism?
Edited by Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore
Deprovincializing Habermas
Global Perspectives
Second edition
Edited by Tom Bailey

For more information about this series, please visit: www​.routledge​.com​/

Ethics​-Human​-Rights​-and​- Global​-Political​-Thought​/ book​- series​/ EHRGPT
Deprovincializing Habermas
Global Perspectives

Second Edition
Edited by Tom Bailey
Second edition published 2022
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DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586

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Contents

Notes on Contributors ix
Foreword by Maeve Cooke xii
Editor’s Preface to the Second Edition xv

Introduction 1
Tom Bailey

Part I  Democratizing

1 Back to Kant?: The Democratic Deficits in Habermas’

Global Constitutionalism 25
Lars Rensmann

2 Democratizing International Law: A Republican

Reading of Habermas’ Cosmopolitan Project 47
James Bohman

3 Feminist Solidarity in India: Communitarian

Challenges and Postnational Prospects 66
Kanchana Mahadevan

4 Deliberation Without Democracy?: Reflections on

Habermas, Mini-publics and China 90
William Smith

Part II  Decolonizing

5 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism: Latin

America and Mignolo’s Decolonial Challenge 111
Raymond Morrow


viii  f Contents

6 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism:

Reformulating the Habermasian Response 130
Richard Ganis

7 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in

Tension 148
John Rundell

Part III  Desecularizing

8 What is Living and What is Dead in Habermas’

Secularization Hypothesis? 173
Kevin W. Gray

9 Reason and Li Xing: A Chinese Solution to Habermas’

Problem of Moral Motivation 189
Tong Shijun

10 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis, Provincializing

Habermas 206
Péter Losonczi

Part IV  Deprovincializing

11 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots? 229

Simone Chambers

12 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue 249

Jeffrey Flynn

Index 271
Notes on Contributors

James Bohman was Danforth Professor of Philosophy and Professor

of International Studies at Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA. His
books include Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (2007),
Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity and Democracy (1996) and
New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy (1991).

Simone Chambers is Professor of Political Science at University of

California Irvine, USA. Her research focuses on issues in delibera-
tive democracy, constitutional politics, the public sphere, secularism
and the work of Jürgen Habermas. She is the author of Reasonable
Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (1996) and
The State of Contemporary Democratic Theory (forthcoming).

Maeve Cooke is Full Professor of Philosophy at University College

Dublin, Ireland, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her books
include Re-Presenting the Good Society (2006) and Language and Reason:
A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (1994). She is also the editor and
translator of Habermas’ On the Pragmatics of Communication (1998) and
has published numerous articles on social and political philosophy in
scholarly journals and edited volumes.

Jeffrey Flynn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham

University, USA. His research focuses on Jürgen Habermas’ social
and political theory and on humanitarianism and human rights. He is
the author of Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A
Philosophical Approach (2014), and of articles in various journals and
book collections.

Richard Ganis is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the City University

of New York and Kean University, USA. He is the author of Politics
from A to Z (2015), The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida:
Between Measurability and Immeasurability (2011) and articles in
Radical Philosophy Review, Comparative and Continental Philosophy
and Critical Horizons, among other journals.


x  f Notes on Contributors

Kevin W. Gray is an LL.M. student at Columbia University and an

adjunct assistant professor at New York University and Fordham
University, USA. He was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at
the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. He has pub-
lished articles on political theory, critical theory and international law in
journals including Ancilla Iuris, Critical Horizons, Philosophia, Philosophy
of the Social Sciences and Dialogue. He is the co-editor and international
law area editor of the Springer Global Encyclopedia of Territorial Rights.

Péter Losonczi was Associate Researcher at the Centre for Metaphysics

and Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, K.U. Leuven,
Belgium. His areas of interest were in early modern philosophy, philos-
ophy of religion, politics and religion, and postsecularism. Besides pub-
lishing various articles in these areas, he co-edited Secularism, Religion
and Politics: India and Europe (2015), The Future of Political Theology
(2012), Discoursing the Post-secular (2010) and From Political Theory to
Political Theology (2010).

Kanchana Mahadevan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Mumbai, India. Her interests include debates in continental European
philosophy, political philosophy and feminist philosophy. She is the
author of Between Femininity and Feminism: Colonial and Postcolonial
Perspectives on Care (2014) and a co-editor of The COVID Spectrum
(2022).

Raymond Morrow is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University

of Alberta, Canada. Besides numerous articles and chapters, most
recently “Habermas and Civic Education” in the Handbook of Civic
Engagement and Education (forthcoming), he authored Critical Theory
and Methodology (1994), and co-authored (with Carlos Alberto Torres)
Reading Freire and Habermas (2002) and Social Theory and Education
(1995).

Lars Rensmann is Professor of European Politics and Society at the

University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has authored numer-
ous articles and chapters on international political thought, global
politics and critical theory. His books include The Politics of Unreason:
The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (2017),
Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (co-edited
with Samir Gandesha, 2012) and Gaming the World: How Sports are
 Notes on Contributors  F  xi

Reshaping Global Politics and Culture (co-authored with Andrei S.

Markovits, 2010).

John Rundell is Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at La Trobe University

and Principal Honorary in the School of Culture and Communication
at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was previously the
Director of the Ashworth Program for Social Theory at the University
of Melbourne. He is the author of Kant: Anthropology, Imagination,
Freedom (2020), Imaginaries of Modernity (2016) and Origins of
Modernity (1987), and the co-editor of numerous collections, including
Critical Theories and the Budapest School (2018), Critical Theory After
Habermas (with Dieter Freundlieb and Wayne Hudson, 2004), Blurred
Boundaries (with Rainer Bauboeck, 1998) and Rethinking Imagination
(with Gillian Robinson, 1994).

Tong Shijun is Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, China.  He was previ-

ously Professor of Philosophy at the East China Normal University. He
has published numerous books and over a hundred articles in politi-
cal philosophy, social theory and epistemology. He is also the Chinese
translator of Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms.

William Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of Government

and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
His research focuses on contemporary political theory, and particu-
larly on issues of deliberative democracy, civil disobedience and inter-
national political thought. He is the author of Civil Disobedience and
Deliberative Democracy (2013), and of articles and chapters in various
journals and anthologies.
Foreword
Maeve Cooke

E ven granting the extraordinary range of his writings, from epis-

temology through linguistics to political theory, any new book on
Jürgen Habermas is faced with a daunting challenge. For, in adding to
the extensive literature that already exists on his work, it must show
how it makes a distinctive contribution to understanding his the-
ory and/or developing it productively. Deprovincializing Habermas:
Global Perspectives successfully meets this challenge. It tackles head-
on a question that for some time has been a source of unease for many
of us who have been influenced by Habermas’ thinking and endorse
key elements of his theoretical project. Does his theory’s normative
power extend across cultures and historical epochs, as Habermas
maintains, or does it lack purchase beyond the socio-cultural context
of post-Enlightenment, ‘Western’ modernity? In short, is Habermas’
theory ‘provincial’, and blind to its own provinciality?
The worry about provinciality ultimately concerns the universal-
ity of Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality. This concept
is the core normative intuition that underlies his project, providing
the basis for his vision of a social realm in which cultural traditions
would be reproduced through processes of intersubjective evaluation
of validity claims, legitimate orders would be dependent on open-
ended, inclusive and fair argumentative practices and individual iden-
tities would be self-regulated through processes of critical reflection.
Communicative rationalization would be balanced with the other
mode of rationality that Habermas deems necessary for the function-
ing of complex modern societies, namely, the functionalist rationality
of the economic and administrative systems.
The question of universality is as old as the Frankfurt School tradi-
tion of critical theory itself. From the beginning, Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adorno and other theorists in this tradition endeavoured to
develop a mode of critique that was at once immanent, in the sense of
being anchored in experiences within existing socio-cultural reality,
and context-transcending, in the sense of going beyond the evalu-
ative frameworks of actual socio-cultural contexts and potentially


 Foreword  F  xiii

extending to all human beings. As they saw it, their task was to
provide an empirically based, critical diagnosis of modern capital-
ist societies that would be emancipatory for humankind in general.
Habermas’ project pursues this same endeavour. His critical social
theory starts from the analysis of existing social and political institu-
tions and the motivations and actions of real human agents; however,
he holds that the validity of its analyses transcends the horizons of
value specific to the social-cultural context in which these institu-
tions and agents are situated. In other words, he derives the normative
power of his theory’s analyses from the concept of communicative
rationality, which he claims is not specific to any particular, ‘provin-
cial’ context, but universal in scope. Maintaining the universality of
communicative rationality, and hence of his critical perspective on
society, is important not merely for reasons of tradition: lacking such
universality, his theory would be unable to allow for intercultural
learning, historical learning and — a theme of his most recent work
— learning from religion. Thus, a great deal turns on the question
of whether the concept of communicative rationality lives up to its
claim to be valid universally and, if not, what modifications would be
necessary in order for it to do so and what implications these would
have for his critical perspective on society.
Communicative rationality is the rational potential for emancipa-
tion that can be extracted from what Habermas calls ‘communicative
action’. In its simplest terms, communicative action is a form of lin-
guistic interaction that involves raising validity claims and respond-
ing to them. It establishes a relationship between speaker and hearer
that is based on a number of normative obligations: the speaker takes
on an obligation to support her claim with reasons, if challenged,
while the hearer takes on a similar obligation to provide reasons for
his ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. This implies that communicative action is
conceptually tied to more or less rudimentary practices of argumen-
tation. Habermas’ claim is that even the most rudimentary forms of
validity-oriented discussion point towards idealized forms of argu-
mentation. He demonstrates this by way of an analysis of the norma-
tive presuppositions of everyday communicative action, arguing that
participants in action of this kind unavoidably commit themselves to
‘strong idealizations’, including the presuppositions that no relevant
argument is suppressed or excluded by participants in the communi-
cative exchange; that participants are truthful, mutually accountable
and motivated only by concern for the better argument; that no force
except that of the better argument is exerted; that no one who could
xiv  f Foreword

make a relevant contribution may be prevented from doing so; and

that a justified validity claim would secure the agreement of an ide-
ally expanded audience.
How might the universality of this concept of communicative
rationality be contested or validated? The early theorists of the
Frankfurt School practised a mode of critical social inquiry that drew
on multiple forms of investigation, in the belief that no single disci-
pline has a monopoly on truth or validity and that justification rather
involves a complex web of mutually reinforcing empirical research,
theoretical observations and philosophical reflections. Habermas,
too, pursues this approach. Initially, he looked for support from
his analysis of everyday language use. There is some doubt about
whether the analysis provides sufficient support for the strong claims
that he makes on behalf of the concept of communicative rational-
ity. However, these claims do not stand or fall with its success. It
is entirely in the spirit of his project to test them and the putative
universality of the concept of communicative rationality by drawing
on research and scholarship in other fields and in other contexts. This
is what the contributions to Deprovincializing Habermas do. Dealing
with topics as diverse as international law, the feminist movement in
India, mini-publics in China, and secularization processes, they make
strong arguments for productive modifications and reformulations of
Habermas’ theory. In doing so, they testify not only to the relevance
of the concept of communicative rationality in a global context, but
also to the need for its continuous re-articulation and renewal in an
ongoing process of contestation and validation.
Editor’s Preface to the
Second Edition
Tom Bailey

S ince the first edition of this volume was published, Habermas

himself has provided a systematic response to the charge of ‘pro-
vincialism’. His Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019) pre-
sents a sophisticated genealogy of the emergence of universally valid
standards of rationality and democracy from peculiarly ‘Western’,
Judeo-Christian and scientific origins. In particular, he argues that
philosophy and democratic societies have ‘learnt’ notions of universal-
ity through Western religions, law and science, notions of normative
autonomy through Kant and notions of hermeneutical immanence
and transcendence through Western pragmatism. In light of this, he
holds that the standards of rationality and democracy articulated by
his political theory are valid contributions to global dialogue about
international problems and justice.
Yet initial responses to Habermas’ book have pointed to persist-
ing strains. In particular, critics have emphasized strains between the
universal validity he claims for his standards of rationality and democ-
racy and the contingent identifications and motivations to which he
also appeals, between the ambitious claims he makes for democracy
and dialogue and his appreciation of global cultural differences and
the risks of Western imperialism, and between his recognition of reli-
gions’ roles in ‘learning’ and solidarity and his restriction of religions’
role in democratic dialogue and decision-making. Indeed, some read-
ers have found these strains to be reflected and exacerbated by the
‘provincial’ nature of Habermas’ genealogy itself. It appears, then,
that the paradoxes and tensions exposed by the global extension and
reception of Habermas’ political theory, and explored by the chapters
in this volume, persist even in his own attempt to respond to them.
The two new chapters included in this second edition explore these
‘deprovincializing’ strains in Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie.
Unlike the book’s initial critics, however, both authors argue that
Habermas employs or provides sophisticated resources for under-
standing and addressing these strains. At the same time, they suggest


xvi  f Editor’s Preface to the Second Edition

that these important resources need further clarification or develop-

ment, and may not be sufficient to dissolve the strains entirely.
Simone Chambers’ ‘Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its
Provincial Roots?’ examines Habermas’ attempt to defend his theory’s
universal validity, despite its ‘Western’ origins. She begins by consid-
ering three important elements. First, she considers how Habermas
thinks that cultures’ shared origins in the emergence of transcend-
ent universality during the ‘Axial Age’ make global intercultural
dialogue possible, and, indeed, also necessary for the ‘West’s’ own
philosophical self-understanding. Second, she considers the impor-
tance of Habermas’ conception of social learning processes, which
both denies any necessity or ‘progress’ in learning and allows that
universal claims can develop from particular origins. Third, she con-
siders the related development of procedural senses of justification,
as Habermas sees these embodied in ‘Western’ scientific enquiry and
democratic constitutionalism. In light of these elements, Chambers
then turns to Habermas’ claim that his theory’s extension beyond its
‘Western’ origins could be vindicated in a global intercultural dia-
logue. Here she emphasizes his sense that, however different, cul-
tures share conditions of technological, bureaucratic and economic
modernity and associated social coordination problems at the supra-
state level. She also argues that Habermas’ insistence on the secular
nature of the dialogue need not exclude all religious contributions
or require the ‘postmetaphysical’ kind of reasoning which he sees
embodied in the ‘West’. Chambers concludes that a global intercul-
tural dialogue could indeed accept the global extension of some of
the ‘Western’ solutions to social problems that Habermas articulates,
and particularly the ‘bootstrapping’ processes of democratic consti-
tutionalism that he describes.
In ‘Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue’, Jeffrey Flynn
argues that Habermas’ attempt to ‘deprovincialize’ his theory through
intercultural dialogue can be better understood and defended by dis-
tinguishing between the different possible objects and participants
of such dialogue. Flynn first considers the objection that Habermas
conceives of intercultural dialogue over human rights in ways that
privilege ‘Western’ perspectives. Here Flynn argues that Habermas’
discourse theory explains the modesty with which any culture must
approach intercultural dialogue, and that Habermas’ ‘Western’
account of constitutional rights is proposed to non-‘Western’ socie-
ties only insofar as they face corresponding challenges of pluralism.
Second, Flynn considers the objection that by conceiving of moder-
nity as the product of progressive learning processes, Habermas
 Editor’s Preface to the Second Edition  F  xvii

assumes the superiority of ‘Western’ modernity. Here too Flynn

argues that theoretical dialogues should be distinguished from non-
theoretical ones. For Flynn, Habermas may be as open and inclusive
towards other theorists – postcolonial and decolonial critics, say – in
dialogue over his theory of modernity as he may be towards nontheo-
rists in non-‘Western’ contexts in dialogue over human rights, for
example, and he need not impose the theoretical commitments he
would defend in the former dialogue on nontheoretical dialogues of
the latter kind. Finally, Flynn considers the objection that Habermas’
genealogy of postmetaphysical reasoning excludes non-‘Western’ con-
tributions. Again, Flynn claims, Habermas’ claims are better under-
stood as directed to different objects and audiences: his genealogy of
philosophy is directed to practitioners and scholars of ‘Western’ phi-
losophy, and his proposal of postmetaphysical reasoning as suitable
for global intercultural dialogue is directed to nonphilosophers of all
cultures. Flynn insists that these dual functions are not essentially
‘provincial’, although he admits that Habermas’ genealogy should be
expanded to include marginalized philosophical voices.
This edition of Deprovincializing Habermas is dedicated to the
memory of James Bohman and Péter Losonczi.
Introduction
Tom Bailey

Seen from global perspectives, Jürgen Habermas’ political theory

can appear both rich and parochial, critical and partial. On the one
hand, he is perhaps the only major contemporary political theorist
to have formulated, and progressively reformulated, a systematic
normative response to global political challenges. One thinks, for
instance, of his conceptions of democratic politics and cosmopolitan
law, his understanding of the variable forms of modernization and
his accounts of the potential for ‘mutual learning’ among conflicting
perspectives, most notably between secular and religious ones. On
the other hand, however, his theory’s origins and locus in the social,
political and philosophical contexts of the European Enlightenment
render its extension to other parts and aspects of global society pro-
foundly problematic. Indeed, when seen from broader, non-‘Western’
perspectives, his attempts to apply or reformulate his theory in
response to global challenges can appear ‘provincial’ in their con-
tinued reliance on ‘Western’ senses of democratic institutions and
debate, the rational ‘autonomy’ that they promote and the moral and
motivational resources that they presuppose. For other parts of the
globe, and global society itself, would seem to develop divergently
from the West — in their increasing economic and communicative
interdependencies, say, or in their ambivalent attitudes to democracy
and their flourishing religious, ethnic and nationalist cultures.
This book is an attempt to engage critically and constructively
with this troubling paradox in the global extension and reception of
Habermas’ political theory. Rather than being mere critics or disci-
ples, then, the contributors undertake to work both with and beyond
Habermas, to identify the precise failings of his project whilst elabo-
rating his and others’ theoretical resources into novel ‘Habermasian’
responses to problems in contemporary global politics. In particu-
lar, by freeing the more generalizable elements of Habermas’ theory
from its ‘Western’ peculiarities and exploring their extension to
non-‘Western’ contexts, they attempt to ‘deprovincialize’ his the-
ory. This introduction contextualizes these contributions by briefly
setting out the basic elements of Habermas’ theory and then relating

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-1
2  f  Tom Bailey

the contributions to three broad themes in global politics with which

both they and Habermas engage, namely, democracy, decolonization
and religion.

Habermas’ Political Project

For Habermas, modernity challenges us to articulate norms for the
coordination of our actions that go beyond both the instrumental and
ideological norms of the modern and the purely conventional norms
of the pre-modern. His response to this challenge is an account of
how, in acting socially, we commit to justify our actions to others,
and thus to pursue a consensus about our actions that satisfies broad
standards of rationality. These standards of ‘communicative rational-
ity’ include not only general rules of argumentation and shared cul-
tural knowledge, meanings and reasons, but also ideal principles of
consensus over true knowledge, right action and sincere expression,
to which appeal can be made when implicit consensus is challenged.
In particular, Habermas argues for a ‘discourse ethics’ according
to which our commitments to right action are subject to a strong
universalizability principle of morality, requiring that their general
observance be acceptable to all affected on the same grounds. He
also emphasizes more particular, ‘ethical’ commitments about good
ends and good lives as contributing to consensus within the particular
cultural groups for which they are meaningful.
However, Habermas also considers the requirements of univer-
sal morality too demanding and those of particular ethics too plural
to ensure social coordination, and hence places more emphasis on
political coordination. In this regard, he argues that coercive laws —
the laws and other policies of representative state institutions — are
subject to a weaker universalizability principle of democratic legiti-
macy, requiring that they be acceptable to all affected citizens on
moral, ethical, pragmatic, or instrumental grounds and in delibera-
tive forums that are dispersed across society. He consequently places
special emphasis on the role of a non-institutional ‘public sphere’ in
enabling citizens to contribute to institutional decision-making.
It is on the basis of this theory of our justificatory commitments
that Habermas articulates his critical approaches to contemporary
politics. For, if correct, the theory shows that the pursuit of rational
acceptability for social norms need not be rejected as a mere ideo-
logical cover for instrumental reasoning or in the name of the extra-
rational ends of the pre-, anti- or post-modern. Rather, it offers
genuine solutions to the problem of coordinating our actions in
 Introduction  F  3

modernity, either in terms of a moral or ethical consensus or, insofar

as this is unachievable, in terms of a legal framework the acceptability
of which is established through democratic procedures. Habermas
therefore criticizes the functional rationality of modern markets and
state administration as a threat to rational consensus and acceptabil-
ity and as alone insufficient to achieve social coordination, insofar as it
coordinates action through money or power rather than through jus-
tificatory commitments. In his terms, the ‘systems’ of modern society
threaten to ‘colonize’ the ‘lifeworlds’ of communicative rationality.
Against this threat, he upholds the modern project of rational auton-
omy, appealing to his theory to show how justification can develop
from the conventional to the rational whilst nonetheless avoiding
overarching and ideal, or ‘metaphysical’, conceptions of rationality.
In this regard, he is particularly critical of non- or anti-democratic
tendencies, insisting that democratic institutions and deliberations
allow citizens to realize both a public and a private ‘self-legislation’.
While pursuing this critical project, however, Habermas has also
elaborated and reformulated his theory in response to a variety of
philosophical, political and social challenges, many of which con-
cern its extension beyond the ‘Western’ contexts in and for which it
was first developed. In particular, he has attempted to explain how
democracy might operate in non-‘Western’ states and at a global
level, to determine the implications and possibilities of his account
of rational social coordination in non-‘Western’ normative contexts
such as those marked by colonization and decolonization and to pro-
vide a response to the persistent influence of religions in modern
societies. That is, he has undertaken to democratize, decolonize and
desecularize his theory for global contexts. The contributions to this
book engage with these three ‘global’ reconfigurations. In each case,
they tend to consider Habermas’ attempts to be laudable and yet ulti-
mately inadequate to the global problems that they address, and they
therefore propose alternative ‘Habermasian’ solutions to the relevant
tensions between his theory and its new global contexts. The rest of
this introduction, like the book itself, is divided among these three
reconfigurations.

Democratizing
The first global challenge with which Habermas engages is that of
democracy and democratization, at both the state and the interna-
tional levels. His engagement develops in the light of his account of
democracy at the state level, which he treats as the institutionalization
4  f  Tom Bailey

in laws of attempts to rationally coordinate social actions on moral,

ethical, pragmatic, and fairly bargained grounds. Crucially, he insists
that — at least through the procedures followed, if not by direct
participation — democratic law-making allows citizens to achieve a
political sense of autonomy, insofar as making laws that are ration-
ally acceptable to all affected allows them to enjoy and determine
the ‘private’ autonomy of liberal freedoms as well as the ‘public’
autonomy of deliberating over the laws that govern them. He thus
envisions a liberal democratic political system that upholds basic
individual freedoms, makes laws by means of an elected parliament
of representatives — which deliberates in generally acceptable terms,
‘filtered’ and ‘translated’ from civil society’s unrestricted delibera-
tions in the informal public sphere — and enforces these laws by
means of an independent judiciary and administration (Habermas
1996, esp. Chs 3–4, 7–8, 1998a: esp. 117–20, 1998d: 215–20, 1998e:
esp. 244–52, 1998f: 254–62).
However, Habermas acknowledges that democratic legitimacy can
no longer be fully achieved in this modern state form. This is because
the increasing interdependencies of national economies and civil socie-
ties, due to such processes as market liberalization and the cross-border
movements of individuals, finance, technology, and trade, raise eco-
nomic, cultural and environmental problems that cannot be resolved
through democratic deliberations at the state level. He has also come
to emphasize that these problems cannot be resolved by extending
democratic deliberations to the global level, particularly since there
is unlikely to be sufficient solidarity among the citizens of different
states (Habermas 2001: 105–9, 2006: 139, 2009b: 116–19, cf. 1998a:
123–27, 1998b: 150–53, 1998c: 182–87, 199, 201). He has therefore
limited his ‘cosmopolitan’ aspirations to the establishment of a sys-
tem of fair negotiations among global actors, legitimated by a global,
‘post- national’ solidarity. He has elaborated this into a three-level
system, comprising state democracies, fair ‘transnational’ negotiations
among extra-state actors affected by political problems that cannot be
resolved at the state level and a ‘supranational’ organization of states (a
reformed United Nations) with responsibility for securing peace and
human rights and supported by a global solidarity regarding such rights
(Habermas 2001: 98–112, 2006: esp. 118–46, 2008d: esp. 314–15,
319–27, 331–35, 342–44, 2009b: 120–26, 2012: esp. 14–20, 53–70).
Yet it is not clear how well this redistribution of political functions
at international levels responds to the requirements of democratic
legitimacy that Habermas affirms at the state level. He envisions the
supranational organization’s responsibilities as being supported and
 Introduction  F  5

monitored by a world public and by non-governmental organizations

and he emphasizes the ‘learning processes’ by which state democra-
cies may come to understand themselves as subject to supranational
limits and transnational negotiations. But he considers the suprana-
tional organization responsible merely for protecting liberal limits on
state authority, and not also for making global laws through demo-
cratic deliberations — that is, he considers it responsible for promot-
ing ‘private’, but not ‘public’, autonomy. Among other things, this
marginalizes considerations of material justice at the supranational
level. He also recognizes that the democratic procedures required for
democratic legitimacy, and necessary particularly to regulate markets
and reflect pluralist cultures, will be lacking in transnational negotia-
tions and cannot be compensated for by the ad hoc multiplication of
political bodies or the normatively-unguided coordination of markets
(Habermas 2001: 108–110, 2006: 135–144, 2008d: 322–23, 326–
27, 333–34, 342–52, 2009b: 124–30, 2012: 66–70). Habermas thus
seems to present his global system as both necessary to resolve fun-
damental global problems and incapable of achieving full democratic
legitimation for the solutions that it might provide.
Nor is it clear that Habermas’ theory of liberal democracy at the
state level can be extended to non-‘Western’ states as straightforwardly
as he claims. For its framework of basic individual freedoms and par-
liamentary neutrality excludes more substantial moral and ethical
considerations from institutionalized politics in the name of a political
sense of rationality, albeit one that is also to reflect the unrestricted
public deliberations of civil society. These distinctions between the
private, the public and the state, and the associated vision of the modes
and prospects of political deliberations, clearly echo the trajectories
of ‘Western’ political systems and cultures. But non-‘Western’ states
manifest rather different systems and cultures, insofar as they place
more emphasis on ‘ethical’ values or informal structures than on pri-
vate and public autonomy, say, or manage pluralism and conflict in
authoritarian, religious or market terms. Such differences raise ques-
tions about the kinds of institutional and informal contexts in which
democratic deliberations can operate, and thus about the justifiabil-
ity and feasibility of extending Habermas’ liberal democratic model
beyond the ‘West’. Most evidently perhaps, the basic individual free-
doms which he claims the supranational organization should enforce
in states may not possess quite the universal validity that he supposes.
In Chapter 1 of this book, ‘Back to Kant? The Democratic Deficits
in Habermas’ Global Constitutionalism’, Lars Rensmann criticizes
the global system that Habermas proposes for such democratic
6  f  Tom Bailey

failings. Rensmann admits that the extension of democratic delib-

erations to the global level, as initially proposed by Habermas, raises
insurmountable problems of distance, complexity and pluralism, and
thus would tend to reinforce, rather than resolve, the existing defi-
cits in global democratic legitimacy. But he argues that Habermas
now denies democratic legitimation to his global system by limiting
global politics to the negotiation of international laws among states
and by proposing a ‘supranational’ constitution of human rights and
peace that requires at most a weak democratic legitimation. Indeed,
Rensmann suggests that to insist on such a juridified global human
rights regime is extremely dangerous, since by assuming a univer-
sal, ‘rational’ consensus over the interpretation and enforcement of
these rights — a consensus which is in fact lacking — it marginalizes
the politics of global human rights. It would thus allow for exten-
sive ‘humanitarian’ interventions by the supranational authority even
against the democratic sentiments of state and global societies.
To avoid these fundamental problems, Rensmann claims that
Habermas would be well-advised to attend more closely to Immanuel
Kant’s cosmopolitanism, the acknowledged inspiration of his theory.
In particular, Rensmann emphasizes that Kant considers global pub-
licity to be both the condition and the realization of global politics,
and therefore insists that the content and limits of the latter can be
determined only by the former, and not by a philosophical theory
of the kind developed by Habermas. Kant consequently envisions
global politics as evolving towards a federation of states regulated by
global publicity — rather than towards a legally constituted institu-
tion for supranational deliberations, as Habermas’ initial proposals
imply, or simply a forum for the pursuit of autonomous states’ inter-
ests circumscribed by a supra- democratic human rights regime, as
in Habermas’ later theory. Rensmann therefore considers Habermas
to be mistaken in dismissing Kant’s vision for its optimistic ‘moral’
character, for it reflects the constitutive tensions between the moral
and the democratic and between the state and the global better than
Habermas’ own global system and it also responds better to the cur-
rent democratic deficits in global politics. In particular, Rensmann
claims, Kant’s theory reveals the possibilities of exploring cosmo-
politan politics, not from the abstract heights of Habermas’ theory,
but ‘from below’ — that is, by recuperating the democratic concerns
that Habermas insists on at the state level to emphasize the need for
sub-national, national and transnational publics to appropriate and
interpret cosmopolitan rights in their own concrete, particular and
contingent exercises of public autonomy.
 Introduction  F  7

In Chapter 2, ‘Democratizing International Law: A Republican

Reading of Habermas’ Cosmopolitan Project’, James Bohman pro-
vides a qualified defence of Habermas’ proposed global system
against doubts such as Rensmann’s. In particular, Bohman compares
Habermas’ system favourably with more and less democratic alter-
natives, while arguing that Habermas himself understates its criti-
cal and democratic potential. For Bohman, to limit cosmopolitan
responsibilities to the moral or the social, and to treat global democ-
racy as at most a means to these extra-political ends, is inadequate
to the demands of democratic legitimacy, the problems raised by
globalization and, indeed, also the current ‘cosmopolitan’ realities
of international institutions and civil society. But he also considers
more demanding theories of global democracy vulnerable to ten-
sions between their opposing deliberative and institutionalized ele-
ments, as well as to the daunting complexity and plurality of existing
global societies and institutions. Bohman thus defends Habermas’
distribution of democratic and other forms of legitimacy across the
national, trans-national and supranational levels, in a system that nei-
ther reduces democracy to a means nor inflates it to a global scope.
Bohman further argues that more extensive democratic legitimacy
and critical leverage can be derived by elaborating on the ‘republican’,
rather than strictly ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal’, character of the system
that Habermas proposes. For, Bohman claims, the republican sense
of freedom as ‘non-domination’ explains how transnational public
spheres could achieve democratic legitimation and autonomy not
directly, by democratic deliberations that realize citizens’ self-legis-
lation, but indirectly, by providing citizens with the recognition and
access to democratic deliberations that would ensure that the terms
of these deliberations are not dictated by others. Bohman claims that
emphasising non-domination would also provide the system with
greater critical leverage on the problems of globalization, such as the
deleterious effects of poverty on political influence, than Habermas
himself allows. While agreeing with Rensmann that the democratic
legitimacy of Habermas’ global system needs strengthening, then
Bohman proposes that the most realistic and critical way of doing
so is not to amplify the role of a Kantian global public, but rather to
emphasize the deliberative and economic implications of the sense of
‘non-domination’ already expressed in the system.
Chapter 3, Kanchana Mahadevan’s ‘Feminist Solidarity in India:
Communitarian Challenges and Postnational Prospects’, also sug-
gests that Habermas understates the democratic and critical
resources available to his global system. However, unlike Bohman
8  f  Tom Bailey

and Rensmann, Mahadevan attributes this to certain European preju-

dices of Habermas’ which, she claims, result in a vision of democracy
beyond the ‘West’ that distorts and obscures the deliberative auton-
omy and solidarity on which his system of state and global democracy
is based. She explores this neglected potential by focusing on the case
of women’s political activism in India. She first employs Irigarayian
notions to reveal a fundamental paradox in Indian women’s participa-
tion in right-wing political movements — namely, that in their activ-
ism, these women participate in a shared political identity beyond
women’s traditional, patriarchal roles, whilst simultaneously promot-
ing precisely these roles. However, Mahadevan resists the Irigarayian
tendency to essen-tialize these roles, acknowledging instead the con-
tingencies and complexities of patriarchy, of its intersections with
other social stratifications and women’s responses to it.
Mahadevan therefore turns to Habermas’ sense of a global soli-
darity based in democratic autonomy as a potentially more fruitful
critical framework for analyzing Indian women’s political activism.
In this regard, she affirms his account of the development of indi-
viduals’ and groups’ moral identities through socialization, insofar
as this makes identities depend on communicative interactions of
certain open, egalitarian kinds, rather than treating them as given
by essential ‘natural’ characteristics and maintained in isolation from
others. She also welcomes his claim that such solidarity is now best
pursued beyond the state, since the state separates political commu-
nity from particular ethical worldviews, but also limits it in ways that
globalization now offers prospects for superseding. Yet Mahadevan
argues that the European model underlying Habermas’ conception
of such ‘postnational’ solidarity leads him to obscure its democratic
and critical potential. In particular, she claims, he fails to recognize
the limitations of European democratic politics itself — its margin-
alization of some cultures and its subservience to corporate inter-
ests, for instance — and its hierarchical relations with non-Western
‘others’, reflected in Habermas’ surprisingly naive treatments of
decolonization and Western intervention in non-Western countries.
In response, Mahadevan proposes the Indian feminist movement as
an alternative model of solidarity for Habermas’ global system. As a
non-institutionalized, sub- and trans-national political community,
she claims, this movement responds to the paradoxical limitations
of women’s participation in right-wing movements and provides
resources for criticizing the effects of economic globalization on
women. Mahadevan suggests that the critical, emancipatory poten-
tial of Habermasian democracy can thus be recovered beyond both
the state and Habermas’ own European prejudices.
 Introduction  F  9

The prospects for extending Habermas’ theory of democracy

to non-Western and sub-national contexts are also considered
in Chapter 4, ‘Deliberation without Democracy? Reflections on
Habermas, Mini-publics and China’, by William Smith. Smith notes
that in response to the overwhelming obstacles of scale, complexity,
information, and accessibility that beset deliberations in the public
spheres of democratic societies, theorists of deliberative democracy
have recently advocated the use of ‘mini-publics’ as a complement to,
or even a substitute for, deliberations in the broader public sphere.
As small, randomly selected groups of citizens engaged in structured
deliberations over public policies, mini-publics pursue Habermas’
concern with the deliberative legitimacy of state decision-making,
although they lack the informal and unrestricted character of the
broader, ‘macro’ level public spheres which his theory focuses on. Yet
Smith notes that some of the most successful examples of the use of
mini-publics are in China, where both the representative institutions
and the broader public spheres characteristic of democratic societies
are largely lacking. By examining these cases, then, Smith develops
a more sophisticated, Habermasian framework for the evaluation of
mini-publics, consisting of three specific criteria of evaluation. First,
he suggests that mini-publics be evaluated as contributions to the
‘learning processes’ through which Habermas thinks that citizens
come to identify with democratic participation, dialogue and con-
cern for the common good. Second, he proposes that mini-publics
be evaluated according to the discursive rationality of their delibera-
tions, in Habermas’ sense of pursuing solutions to collective prob-
lems that all those affected could accept, as well as according to the
responsiveness of political office holders to them. And finally, Smith
argues that mini-publics should be evaluated as contributions to the
broader public sphere, in which those citizens not involved in a mini-
public’s deliberations may participate. In particular, he proposes
that mini-publics be considered as contributions to the formation of
opinions and the exercise of autonomy by citizens that Habermas
emphasizes as functions of the broader public sphere. Smith shows
that the successful Chinese examples satisfy the first and second cri-
teria surprisingly well, but fail on the third criteria since the broader
public sphere in China is limited by its authoritarian institutions.
He concludes that the hope that mini-publics might help to over-
come the obstacles facing deliberations in the broader public spheres
of democratic and non-democratic states ought to be tempered by
this crucial third criteria. Smith’s framework thus suggests that not
only Habermas’ vision of a global democratic system, but also his
model of state democracy could learn much from examining forms of
10  f  Tom Bailey

deliberation in non-democratic, non-‘Western’ societies, and particu-

larly from considering the relations between ‘micro’-level delibera-
tions and broader public spheres and institutions.

Decolonizing
The extension of Habermas’ account of democratic politics outside
its Western locus also raises questions regarding the conceptual and
motivational resources and the form of social coordination that the
account envisions. According to his theory of justificatory commit-
ments, an orientation towards consensus is implicit in any social
action, in the form of ideal requirements to be satisfied if the action
is to be justified to others. Most fundamentally, the theory identi-
fies a principle according to which the generalized justification of
an action must be acceptable to all those affected by the action,
in an open-ended, inclusive and equal dialogue. While the prob-
lems, claims and concepts involved in such a dialogue may derive
from particular contexts, this principle itself is intended to express
a perspective that abstracts from all particular contexts (Habermas
1990a: 57–76, 98–109, 1990b: 120–22, 133–38, 1990c: 196–203,
1993a: 6–17). Crucially, then, by taking this principle as his model
Habermas conceives of social coordination as a matter of rational
justification, and thus as cognitive and dialogical, and as a matter
of universality, reflecting a shared justificatory perspective on par-
ticular interests and values. He consequently insists that the goal of
moral development, or ‘learning’, is the ability to abstract from per-
sonal interests and values and from the affections, conventions and
conceptions of particular groups, for the sake of an autonomy and
solidarity of individuals considered merely as rational interlocutors
(Habermas 1990b: 120–32, 138–70, 1990c: 204–11, 1993b: 30–54,
2003: esp. 256–66). And, while his account of democratic politics
weakens the form of consensus required, it nonetheless extends this
model of action coordination and moral development to political life
by conceiving of democratic procedures as expressing a justificatory
perspective concerned with general rational acceptability and an
associated political sense of autonomy.
As the chapters in Part II of the book show, the problems raised by
this model are made especially evident by a second global challenge to
Habermas’ political theory, that of colonization and decolonization.
For colonization has imposed or obscured, and decolonization has
exacerbated or revealed, resources and forms of social coordination
absent in the colonizing ‘West’, such as ethnic hierarchies, economic
 Introduction  F  11

dependencies and alternative political communities. Insofar as such

non-‘Western’ resources and forms resist ‘translation’ into justifica-
tory claims or the rational management of conflicts among them, they
challenge the universality of the justificatory framework of social
coordination on which Habermas’ theory is based. Indeed, they sug-
gest that the cultural knowledge, meanings and reasons of communi-
cative ‘lifeworlds’ do not always admit of such a universal framework
or of Habermas’ strict distinction between it and other, ‘systemic’
forms of coordination. Habermas attempts to accommodate such
challenges not only by admitting various moral, ethical, pragmatic,
and instrumental considerations, as well as socially dispersed forms
of dialogue, into political justification, but also by acknowledging
that ‘ethical’ commitments to good ends and lives attach to particular
cultural contexts and that modernization takes ‘multiple’ forms. Yet
it is far from clear that the resources and forms of social coordination
available in (de)colonized societies can be satisfactorily classified even
in these terms or that they can be subjected to the subordinations
among the moral, the ethical and the democratic that Habermas con-
tinues to insist on.
Chapter 5, Raymond Morrow’s ‘Defending Habermas Against
Eurocentrism: Latin America and Mignolo’s Decolonial Challenge’,
offers a robust defence of Habermas’ theory against such challenges.
Morrow’s focus is on Latin America, where, he notes, Habermas’
theory has become a significant reference point for the study and
discussion of deliberative democracy, civil society and the public
sphere. However, it is also now contested by the ‘decolonial’ pro-
gramme associated with Walter Mignolo. This programme rejects the
epistemic ‘colonization’ of Latin America by ‘Eurocentric’ theories
such as Habermas’ and promotes the ‘liberation’ of the distinctive,
marginalized knowledges and perspectives of the colonized, so as to
reveal their ‘double voice’ as both victims and agents of epistemic
‘colonization’. In response to this challenge, Morrow first argues
that such a wholesale rejection of modern theoretical concepts for
the sake of a radical ‘otherness’ simplifies the multifaceted reality
of Latin America, and particularly the interrelations between the
colonized and the colonizing. He even suggests that, ironically, the
decolonial programme thus echoes the uncritical appeal to a radical
‘other’ of modernity made by much ‘Eurocentric’ theory. Morrow
further argues that, when applied to Habermas, the decolonial chal-
lenge is profoundly misplaced. For Habermas views modernization as
neither inevitable nor singular, recognizes the pathologies associated
with modern ‘systems’ and appreciates the significance of particular,
12  f  Tom Bailey

‘ethical’ cultures alongside universal, rational morality. In Morrow’s

view, Habermas also rightly insists on the emancipatory potential of
the ‘Eurocentric’ framework of human rights, insofar as this is open
to reflective interpretation by and among cultures. Indeed, Morrow
concludes his chapter by proposing that, rather than the decolonial
programme, the political concerns associated with colonization and
decolonization in Latin America would be better treated by elaborat-
ing on Habermas’ sense of intercultural learning. Through this learn-
ing, Morrow claims, in decolonized societies marginalized cultures
would engage with ‘modern’ cultures, reciprocally developing their
practical goals and theoretical knowledge towards consensus, just as
Habermas envisions ‘ethical’ cultures also converging on rational,
moral and democratic principles. For Morrow, then, notwithstanding
their justificatory and universalist foundations, Habermas’ accounts
of democracy, ethical culture, modernization, and moral develop-
ment may satisfactorily accommodate the differences of decolonized
societies.
However, in Chapter 6, ‘Care, Power and Deconstructive
Postcolonialism: Reformulating the Habermasian Response’, Richard
Ganis suggests that Morrow’s conclusion is too optimistic. For Ganis
argues that Habermas’ theory can resist the challenges posed by
decolonized societies only if it is supplemented with Axel Honneth’s
notion of ‘care’, so as to provide a richer account of the ‘ethical’.
Ganis articulates the challenge of (de)colonization in deconstructive
postcolonialist terms, focusing on how proponents of deconstruc-
tive postcolonialism — whether informed by a Foucauldian geneal-
ogy of power relations, like Homi Bhabha, or by a Derridean ethics
of unconditional responsibility to the ‘other’, like Gayatri Spivak —
view overarching rationality of the kind envisioned by Habermas’
theory. In particular, he shows how they view such rationality as an
Enlightenment prejudice that obscures the perspectives and mean-
ings of colonial ‘otherness’ and the associated prospects for subvert-
ing dominant colonial frameworks. Unlike Morrow, Ganis considers
Habermas’ idealizing supposition of justificatory consensus and his
recognition of ‘ethical’ commitments to be inadequate responses
to this challenge. In particular, he emphasizes that, however well
Habermas’ notion of the ‘ethical’ recognizes the affective, asymmet-
rical and partial nature of our responses to others, Habermas none-
theless subordinates them to the rational, symmetrical and impartial
principles of morality and democracy. Indeed, he reads Habermas’
dismissal of a caricatured Derrida — for appealing to a transcendent
‘otherness’, beyond the grasp of communicative rationality, and thus
 Introduction  F  13

reducing justification to mere ‘taste’ — as symptomatic of Habermas’

failure to appreciate the challenge of (de)colonization to his theory.
To respond more adequately to this challenge, Ganis proposes to
weaken Habermas’ subordination of the ethical to the rational by
employing Honneth’s account of caring recognition as an ‘ethical’
response that makes possible, even as it is ultimately eclipsed by,
moral and political rationality. For Ganis, such a reformulation of
Habermas’ theory would accommodate the deconstructive postco-
lonialist concern for the non-cognitive and the ‘other’ without aban-
doning the authority of the rational norms that underlie Habermas’
critical morality and politics. He claims that this reformulation would
also uphold Habermas’ attendant distinction between lifeworld and
system, which both Honneth and deconstructive postcolonialists risk
blurring — Honneth by situating caring recognition at the ‘concep-
tual and genetic’ foundation not only of communicative relations, but
also of relations in modern economic and administrative systems,
and deconstructive post- colonialists by treating all social relations
as relations of power or otherness. Thus, for Ganis, to respond to the
challenge of (de)colo nization, the attitude of ‘care’ must be admit-
ted into Habermas’ justificatory and universalist account of action
coordination in modern societies, and this can be done without sur-
rendering the crucial theoretical and critical distinctions between
normativity, care and power.
In contrast, in Chapter 7, ‘From Communicative Modernity to
Modernities in Tension’, John Rundell argues that Habermas can avoid
charges of ‘Eurocentrism’ only by abandoning precisely the emphasis
on justification that both Morrow and Ganis wish to preserve. Taking
a broader perspective on the resources for social coordination avail-
able in a globalized modernity, Rundell admits that Habermas’ the-
ory identifies standards for the rational resolution of social problems
which are not limited to specific contexts and that it rightly avoids
reducing the ‘modern’ to any single distinctive element or logic. But
he considers the scope and critical potential of Habermas’ theory
to be limited by its exclusive focus on justificatory social coordina-
tion and the threats to it deriving from non-justificatory ‘systems’.
For Rundell, the disposition to communicative reasoning, like social
understandings in general, itself rests on non-rational, non-linguis-
tic ‘imaginaries’ that — rather than reflecting a singular ‘rational’,
or ‘normative’, logic of the kind identified by Habermas’ universal
justificatory perspective — are inevitably contingent, indeterminate
and cross-cutting. Indeed, Rundell proposes that ‘modernity’ be
understood precisely as the contingency of six distinct imaginaries
14  f  Tom Bailey

and their variable degrees and intersections. Specifically, he presents

modern markets as an imaginary of abstraction and limitlessness;
modern industry as one of specialized, and yet depersonalized, func-
tions; modern art as a transcendence of the worldly and of traditional
stylistic communities; and the modern state as an imaginary of ter-
ritorial and cultural inclusion and exclusion that competes with a
democratic imaginary of consensus and an imaginary of limitless
expression in the public sphere. If these imaginaries create irreduc-
ible ‘tensions’ within modern societies and an irreducible multiplicity
among them, Rundell claims, then problems of social coordination
arise which cannot be treated from a single conceptual and evaluative
perspective — that is, they manifest an irreducible dissonance, rather
than the potential for rational consensus that Habermas envisions.
Indeed, Rundell concludes by suggesting that the contingent, disso-
nant character of modernities is most evident in the sense of limitless
expression associated with the imaginary of the public sphere, on the
condition that this is freed from the rationalist, universalist preoc-
cupations manifested in Habermas’ deliberative theory.

Desecularizing
The third and final part of the book considers a third global challenge
with which Habermas has engaged, that of religions. As he has come
to emphasize, religions play persisting and novel roles in modern soci-
eties — one thinks particularly of the United States, the Middle East
and Western Europe. Yet recognizing these roles risks destabilizing
fundamental elements of his theory, from his emphasis on justifica-
tory claims and on moral development towards autonomy to his func-
tionalist and evolutionary treatment of society and his attempt to
articulate his theory in ‘post-metaphysical’ terms. Indeed, in view
of such commitments, he had previously relegated religions to mere
remnants of the pre-modern, to be at most ‘translated’ into secular
terms by modern communicative reasoning (Habermas 2002a: esp.
72–78, 2002b: esp. 133–38, 2002c: 150–54, 159–64). And, while
now admitting that religions play roles in modern societies that he
had not previously anticipated, Habermas tends to interpret these
roles in ways that limit their destabilizing implications for his the-
ory. In particular, he insists that while members of modern societies
may perceive a ‘return’ of religions to public and private life — due
to such things as immigration, political activism by religious groups
and the interpretation of global conflicts in religious terms — the
functional differentiation of spheres in these societies nonetheless
 Introduction  F  15

precludes religions’ serving to coordinate social actions. In this sense,

then, he continues to insist that modernization implies seculariza-
tion (Habermas 2008b: 116–18, 2008c: 211, 238–40, 2008e: 17–21,
2009a: 62–65, Mendieta 2010: 1–4, 8, 10-11). He also argues that the
political issues raised by religions — regarding such things as abortion
and euthanasia, homosexuality and the veil — are most satisfactorily
resolved by excluding religious arguments from parliamentary delib-
erations, to ensure that the latter are equally accessible to all, while
preserving a private sphere of individual freedom and opening the
public sphere to all arguments — which must therefore be ‘filtered’,
or ‘translated’, if they are to enter parliamentary deliberations. He
considers this liberal democratic treatment of religions to be fair to
religious citizens and to promote the ‘mutual learning’ by which both
the religious and the secular may abandon claims to exclusive author-
ity, each recognizing the insights offered by the other and commit-
ting to the liberal democratic framework (Habermas 2008a: 111–13,
2008b: 120–40, 2008c: 238–40, 245–46, 2008e: 22–29, 2009a:
66–77, 2010: 18–23, 2011: 23–28; Mendieta 2010: 1–2, 9–12).
Ultimately, then, Habermas recognizes a ‘postsecular’ consciousness,
but appears to leave the secular foundations of his political theory
untouched.
It is far from clear that this is an adequate response to the roles
of religions in modern societies. In particular, insofar as religious
worldviews are irreducible to justificatory claims and to the universal,
autonomous moral and political requirements that Habermas takes
such claims to imply, a consciousness of a ‘return’ of these worldviews
to public and private life would seem to require a more substantial
reconsideration of the nature and standards of his justificatory frame-
work, much as (de)colonized societies also appear to do. It would also
entail less smooth engagements between the religious and the secular
than the ‘mutual learning’ and the resulting rational ‘autonomy’ that
Habermas envisions. Given the variety of cognitive and motivational
resources available, other outcomes are surely imaginable, including
ones less benign than Habermas’ liberal democratic reconciliation,
and it would seem arbitrary to dismiss these as due merely to ‘distor-
tions’ in communication or ‘deficits’ in learning. Indeed, Habermas
himself admits that the political consciousnesses of religious and non-
religious citizens in postsecular societies are ‘unpredictable’, since
they develop not only through cognitive learning, but also in non-
cognitive and non-political ways (2008b: 144; see also 143–47, 2008c:
245–46). Furthermore, to limit the role of religions in modern socie-
ties to a perceived ‘return’ of religions in once apparently ‘secular’
16  f  Tom Bailey

societies is to marginalize the far more substantive roles they play in

coordinating modern societies, within and beyond the ‘West’. One
thinks, for instance, of recent developments in North Africa, as well
as the influence of neo-Protestant movements in the United States.
And Habermas himself admits that a postmetaphysical theory like
his, even with its liberal democratic framework, lacks the resources to
elucidate and cultivate the social solidarity — the non-coercive coop-
eration, or shared ‘faith’ — which is necessary to combat the over-
extension of modern ‘systems’ and which religions instead provide
(2008c: 209–11, 223–29, 238–40, 242, 245).
In the light of such concerns, two chapters in Part III undertake
to defend the secular character of Habermas’ theory of rationality
and the account of democratic politics that he bases on it. In ‘What is
Living and What is Dead in Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis?’,
Kevin W. Gray focuses on the worry that Habermas’ insistence on
the secularization of modern societies is vulnerable to the criticisms
standardly made of Max Weber’s corresponding conception, to which
Habermas is much indebted. In particular, by treating modern ration-
alization simply as the extension of instrumental rationality at the
expense of irrational worldviews like religions, Weber’s conception
not only denudes modernity of any overarching rational resources for
evaluating the goals pursued by instrumental rationality, but is also
vulnerable to a wealth of counter examples, from resistance to the
Catholic church in Europe in the Middle Ages to the re-Islamization
of developed societies in the contemporary Middle East.
Gray therefore undertakes to show how, in appropriating Weber’s
conception of secularization, Habermas also reformulates it in a way
that — albeit without his full awareness — avoids the criticisms made
of Weber without undermining the fundamental role of seculariza-
tion in Habermas’ theory of rationality and account of democracy.
In particular, Gray emphasizes how Habermas conceives of modern
rationalization in terms of senses of communicative rationality which
extend beyond the instrumental, and which thus present new critical
possibilities for modern societies, particularly in the democratic form
of law and the associated public sphere. Crucially, Gray points out,
such rationalization need involve ‘secularization’ only in the modest
sense that it brings with it a multiplication of functional spheres and
thus a normative pluralism which precludes overarching worldviews
like religions from providing realistic solutions to social coordination
problems. Thus, Gray concludes, the roles that religions may continue
to play in modern societies need not undermine Habermas’ ‘secular’
claim that ultimately only communicative rationality, particularly in
its democratic form, can coordinate actions in such societies.
 Introduction  F  17

In Chapter 9, ‘Reason and Li Xing: A Chinese Solution to Habermas’

Problem of Moral Motivation’, Tong Shijun also suggests that the sec-
ular character of Habermas’ theory should be upheld in the face of
religious challenges. However, Tong argues that this requires a recon-
ceptualization of Habermas’ understanding of communicative reason-
ing itself. He focuses on the problem of explaining agents’ motivation
to endorse the normative commitments that Habermas’ theory identi-
fies — a problem which Tong, following Habermas, articulates in Max
Horkheimer’s terms, as the apparent ‘impossibility of deriving from
reason any fundamental argument against murder’. Tong believes that
Habermas is mistaken in turning to religions for such motivation in
modern, secular societies. Instead, he argues, Habermas’ theory of
rationality can be enriched so as to provide for both justification and
motivation by employing the Chinese philosopher, Liang Shuming’s
notion of a distinctive Chinese rationality, ‘xi ling’. Liang presents this
rationality as universal and communicative in its independence from
instincts, goods and force, and yet also as relative to context and moti-
vating through feeling. For Tong, Liang thus shows how principles of
a Habermasian, communicatively rational kind can be conceived as
motivating. Tong further claims that the spiritual sense that Liang gives
to such rationality, in its embracing all agents in an ‘impersonal feel-
ing’, shows how this motivation can be conceived without the substan-
tial, pre-modern senses of religious transcendence to which Habermas
himself problematically appeals in attempting to solve the problem of
motivation. Tong concludes by suggesting that Liang’s sense of rational-
ity remains available to Chinese political and public reasoning, despite
the evident failures to realize it in the past and the present.
However, in the final chapter, ‘Radicalizing the Post-secular
Thesis, Provincializing Habermas’, Peter Losonczi suggests that even
such defences of the secular character of Habermas’ political theory
are insufficient. Indeed, Losonczi argues that Habermas’ own appre-
ciation of the ‘postsecular’ nature of contemporary societies, and thus
of the doubtful association of modernization with secularization, is
insufficiently sensitive to the religious plurality that these societies
manifest. For although he now recognizes the public significance of
religions in once-secular societies, Habermas nonetheless insists on
the ‘existential security’ — the lack of a ‘need’ for religions — that
members of modern societies experience. In Losonczi’s view, this
represents a shift away from the rationalization and functional dif-
ferentiation that Habermas previously claimed would make modern
societies secular, but it also leaves Habermas with an impoverished
sense of the rich range of forms, roles and ‘modern’ elements that reli-
gions have in contemporary societies. In response, Losonczi suggests
18  f  Tom Bailey

that the account of a postsecular ‘consciousness’ which Habermas

presents alongside his questionable sociological claims offers more
promising possibilities. In particular, he proposes to liberate this
account from Habermas’ insistence on subordinating religions to a sin-
gle, universal justificatory perspective, and from the associated senses
of ‘autonomy’ and ‘learning’, by elaborating it in terms of the Catholic
theologian, Lieven Boeve’s criticism of the Catholic Church’s strat-
egy of merely ‘correlating’ Catholic with secular principles. Doing
so, Losonczi claims, results in a conception of the dynamic intercon-
nections that exist between religious and secular cultures as mutual
‘recontextualizations’.
This reformulated account of postsecular ‘consciousness’, he con-
cludes, better accommodates the creative possibilities for justifica-
tory dialogue and acceptance within and between different religions,
and also reveals the particular religious origins of Habermas’ sense of
communicative rationality itself.

Conclusions
By testing and extending it outside its original ‘Western’ context,
then, these chapters suggest reformulations and supplementations to
Habermas’ theory which would render it more comprehensive and
critical in its treatment of global political problems. To provide the
global system that Habermas proposes with more extensive demo-
cratic legitimation and critical leverage, and to free his model of state
democracy of its ‘Western’ peculiarities, the chapters in Part I turn
to the potentials of deliberations in sub- and extra- state publics.
Those in Part II explore the non-rational and contingent resources
of modern societies with a view to determining how far the realities
of non-‘Western’, (de)colonized societies can be accommodated in a
justificatory and universalist framework of the kind that Habermas
insists on. And the chapters in part III suggest that the justifica-
tory status, scope and motivational force of this framework require
further reformulations if it is to respond to the roles of religions in
modern societies. Indeed, the overall project of ‘deprovincializing’
Habermas’ theory pursued by all of the chapters may be perhaps
compared with the peculiar task that he himself attributes to theo-
rists and to citizens of postsecular societies in their dealings with
religions: the task of ‘translating’ religious meanings into criticizable
justificatory claims. For while he claims that the Western philosophi-
cal tradition has ‘learned’ some of its most fundamental concepts
from such translations, he also admits that religions must ultimately
 Introduction  F  19

remain ‘opaque’, or ‘cognitively unacceptable’, to philosophy or rea-

son (Habermas 2008b: 143, 2008c: 242; see also 2008a: 104–11,
2008b: 135–42, 2011: 25–28; Mendieta 2010: 4–10). In analogous
ways, the deprovincializing ‘translation’ of Habermas’ theory into
non-‘Western’ contexts and terms appears to involve reflective refor-
mulations as well as incomprehensions on both sides. While much of
this dialectical project remains to be explored — one thinks of prob-
lematic concepts like social ‘development’ and the ‘Western’ itself,
examined only indirectly here — the contributions to this book make
pioneering attempts to envision a ‘deprovincialized’ Habermasian
political theory, one ‘translated’ into genuinely global terms.1

References
Habermas, Jürgen. 1990a. ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program
of Philosophical Justification’, in Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber
Nicholsen, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 43–115.
———. 1990b. ‘Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action’, in
Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian
Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 116–94.
———. 1990c. ‘Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel’s Critique of
Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?’, in Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber
Nicholsen, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 195–215.
———. 1993b. ‘Remarks on Discourse Ethics’, in Justification and
Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 19–111.
———. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse
Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass.

1 
I would like to thank Jim Bohman, Maeve Cooke, Richard Ganis,
Ray Morrow, Will Smith, and John Rundell for their helpful comments
on a draft of this introduction; Aakash Singh Rathore for his assistance
in preparing the collection; and Vivienne Matthies-Boon and the Centre
for Globalisation Studies at the University of Groningen for hosting a
workshop, ‘Global Perspectives on Habermas’, at which drafts of some of
the chapters were discussed.
20  f  Tom Bailey

———. 1998a. ‘The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of

Sovereignty and Citizenship’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 105–27.
———. 1998b. ‘On the Relation between the Nation, the Rule of Law and
Democracy’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory,
eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 129–53.
———. 1998c. ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred
Years’ Historical Remove’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 165–201.
———. 1998d. ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic
Constitutional State’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 203–36.
———. 1998e. ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, in The Inclusion
of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo
De Greiff, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 239–52.
———. 1998f. ‘On the Internal Relation between the Rule of Law and
Democracy’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory,
eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 253–64.
———. 2001. ‘The Postnational Constellation and the Future of
Democracy’, in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans.
Max Pensky, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 58–112.
———. 2002a. ‘Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this
World’, in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and
Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta, Polity Press, Cambridge, 67–94.
———. 2002b. ‘Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason Belong?
Johannes Baptist Metz on Unity amidst Multicultural Plurality’, in
Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, ed.
Eduardo Mendieta, Polity Press, Cambridge, 129–38.
———. 2002c. ‘A Conversation about God and World: Interview with
Eduardo Mendieta’, in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason,
God and Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta, Polity Press, Cambridge,
147–67.
———. 2003. ‘Rightness versus Truth: On the Sense of Normative
Validity in Moral Judgments and Norms’, in Truth and Justification,
trans. Barbara Fultner, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 237–75.
———. 2006. ‘Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still
Have a Chance?’, in The Divided West, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 115–93.
 Introduction  F  21

———. 2008a. ‘Prepolitical Foundations of the Constitutional State?’, in

Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 101–13.
———. 2008b. ‘Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions
for the “Public Use of Reason” by Religious and Secular Citizens’, in
Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 114–47.
———. 2008c. ‘The Boundary between Faith and Knowledge: On the
Reception and Contemporary Importance of Kant’s Philosophy of
Religion’, in Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays,
trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 209–47.
———. 2008d. ‘A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?’,
in Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans.
Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 312–52.
———. 2008e. ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives
Quarterly 25(4): 17–29.
———. 2009a. ‘What is Meant by a “Post-Secular Society”? A Discussion
on Islam in Europe’, in Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 59–77.
———. 2009b. ‘The Constitutionalization of International Law and
the Legitimation Problems of a Constitution for World Society’,
in Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 109–30.
———. 2010. ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in An Awareness of
What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 15–23.
———. 2011. ‘“The Political”: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable
Inheritance of Political Theology’, in Eduardo Mendieta and
Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), The Power of Religion in the Public
Sphere, Columbia University Press, New York, 15–33.
———. 2012. ‘The Crisis of the European Union in Light of a
Constitutionlization of International Law: An Essay on the
Constitution for Europe’ in The Crisis of the European Union: A
Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1–70.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2010. ‘A Postsecular World Society? On the
Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the
Multicultural World Society: An Interview with Jürgen Habermas’,
trans. Matthias Fritsch, The Immanent Frame, https://tif.ssrc.org/
wp-content/uploads/2010/02/A-Postsecular-World-Society-TIF.pdf
(accessed 8 February 2022).
 Part I
Democratizing


1
Back to Kant?
The Democratic Deficits in Habermas’
Global Constitutionalism
Lars Rensmann

In 2006, Jürgen Habermas raised the question, ‘Does the consti-

tutionalization of international law still have a chance?’ With this, he
presupposes that a constitutionalized framework of global public law,
enabling the global ‘normative taming of political power through law’
(Habermas 2006: 116), is required to enact cosmopolitan norms and
to ensure international peace and security. His question also indicates
his fear that the process of such normatively desirable cosmopolitan
constitutionalization is under threat, not only because governments
bend existing rules to national interests, but also because global con-
stitutionalism and the universal juridification of international rela-
tions themselves face a legitimation crisis.
In the light of this concern, this chapter seeks to offer a critical
reappraisal of two different models of global constitutionalism pro-
posed by Habermas that respond to Immanuel Kant’s cosmopoli-
tanism and seek to move beyond it. In particular, I will argue that
although Habermas’ models absorb Kant’s cosmopolitan intuitions
and contribute important resources for critiquing resilient nationalist
fictions and sovereigntist shortcomings, cultural relativism and arbi-
trary justice, they also risk fetishizing what he presupposes a priori to
be universally consensual, rational and binding formal constitutional
principles. Without pretending to offer an exhaustive treatment of
his cosmopolitan writings, I will show how far Habermas’ rational-
ist conception of cosmopolitan law thus departs from his discursive
theory of deliberative democracy and its emphasis on politically, cul-
turally and communicatively grounded democratic legitimation. In
effect, I will argue, Habermas replaces the latter with the classical
liberal priority of transcendentally-grounded formal human rights

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-3
26  f  Lars Rensmann

and gestures towards standardized procedures to determine if and

when global law enforcement is justified. Habermas’ conception of
cosmopolitan law thereby sidelines the effective conditions of public
autonomy, which his own theory of deliberative democracy identifies
as necessary to regulate the implementation of rights and any other
legitimate legal principles.
I will further argue that, in this, Habermas’ global constitutional-
ism is more ‘Kantian’, or rigorously formalistic, than Kant himself.
For, unlike Habermas and despite his own formalism, Kant also
recognizes the practical limitations of coercive cosmopolitan law
without the proper public conditions, revealing tensions in the cos-
mopolitan project that cannot be resolved philosophically, but only
through political ‘translations’, mediations and appropriations. Thus,
while Habermas offers some important new conceptual insights into
the changing conditions of human rights, democracy and constitu-
tionalism, reflecting post-Westphalian developments that Kant could
not foresee, his ‘fundamental conceptual revision’ (Habermas 1998b:
179) tends to suffocate the crucial political space in Kant’s cosmopol-
itanism and gloss over constitutive tensions of which Kant remains
acutely aware. As a corrective to the democratic deficit and top-down
elements of Habermas’ models, then, it is worth reconsidering his
own earlier accounts of democratic deliberation, which embrace the
potentially unsettling power of diverse (trans)national democratic
publics and allocate a central place to self-legislating and deliberating
subjects (Scheuerman 2008). I will suggest that such an approach
reflects Kant’s political moment and conception of public right more
faithfully and ultimately provides for a more robust sense of human
rights politics and of cosmopolitanism ‘from below’.

Kant’s Cosmopolitanism and Habermas’ Critique

In his theoretical reflections on the ‘cosmopolitan question’, Habermas
consistently takes Kant as his point of departure. He recognizes that
Kant not only develops several groundbreaking modern political-
philosophical conceptions of the cosmopolitan condition and cosmo-
politan public right, but also, by suggesting that ‘the peoples of the
earth’ have started to evolve into a ‘universal community’ in which
‘the violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’
(Kant 1795: 107), is the first to conceive of the global public inter-
connectedness that now informs global politics. Such a global public
not only serves a critical function in Kant’s envisioned cosmopolitan
condition — it is also the latter’s very precondition. For in Kant’s
 Back to Kant?  F  27

account, the mere rational and moral validity of cosmopolitan prin-

ciples is insufficient to necessitate their realization in cosmopolitan
law. In order to yield moral and political authority to cosmopolitan
principles, he claims, they must also be grounded in critical debate
over what the law ought to be (Burgett 1998: 42). What Kant calls
the ‘affirmative and transcendental principle of public right’, namely,
that ‘all maxims relating to the right of other men are unjust if they
are not consistent with conditions of publicity’, thus establishes ‘har-
mony between right and politics’ (1795: 130) by synthesizing and
mediating between them. Consequently, any lawful global condition
must meet the robust standards of global publicity as its prerequisite.
Furthermore, Kant does not philosophically specify the global public
sphere’s political qualities and boundaries, or indeed illustrate how
the transcendental formula will actually work in global politics, but
rather emphasizes the role of particulars that ‘stand in need of pub-
licity’ (ibid.). As Dick Howard has shown, this points to the place of
the political in Kant’s system: its founding morality needs a politi-
cal complement which cannot be defined from within the critical
method (see Howard 1987: 266ff.). Without a transparent and robust
global public capable of engendering global public will-formation, in
Kant’s view, cosmopolitan law must remain primarily a regulative
ideal and cosmopolitan right be limited to universal hospitality (itself
a far-reaching requirement, unrealized in the existing global political
order).
Another aspect of Kant’s political cosmopolitanism is significant
for the critique and revisions that Habermas suggests. Insofar as Kant
sets out a politico-legal architecture of cosmopolitan conditions, there
is a remarkable tension between his ‘Idea for a Universal History with
a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and his ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’
(1795). The former delineates the ‘inevitable outcome’ or telos of
a ‘world federation’ conceived as a ‘cosmopolitan system of general
political security’ that subordinates states to external, binding coer-
cive public law. Replicating the social contract model of a republic on
a global level, such ius cosmopoliticum is anchored in ‘law-governed
external relations’ among political communities. It ‘derives its secu-
rity and rights not from its own power or its own legal judgement, but
solely from . . . a united power and the law- governed decisions of a
united will’ (Kant 1784: 49, 47).
In contrast, in ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ Kant condemns the idea
of a world federation as that of a ‘soulless despotism’. Here, he departs
from a globalized social contract model and distinguishes between
the union of a unitary ‘world government’, on the one hand, and the
28  f  Lars Rensmann

voluntary ‘pacific federation’ or confederated ‘league of nations’ that

he proposes, on the other (Kant 1795; see Habermas 1998b: 168ff.).
Although Kant now conceives of cosmopolitan right in terms of a
universal hospitality that imposes on states an important political
obligation to individual human beings, irrespective of their belong-
ing to a particular territory (see Fine 2003), the voluntary ‘universal
association’ or ‘permanent congress of states’ that he envisions (Kant
1797: 119) hardly transcends the weak binding force of conventional
international law. Indeed, Kant argues that such a federation could be
‘dissolved at any time’ (ibid.: 120). In contrast to a union based on a
constitution like that of the American states, such a federation evolves
among autonomous political communities and upholds their political
autonomy: ‘This federation does not aim to acquire any power like
that of a state, but merely to preserve and secure the freedom of each
state itself, along with that of the other confederated states’ (Kant
1795: 104). In this cosmopolitan conception, a pluralistic federation
without the universal rule of ‘public coercive laws’ (ibid.: 105) may
gradually extend to encompass all states, and thus is practicable and
has ‘objective reality’. While Kant suggests that external public coer-
cive laws — ‘an international state (civitas gentium)1 that embraces ‘all
peoples of the earth’ — remains the rational telos of world society, he
turns to a politically pragmatic cosmopolitan model that reflects the
actual democratic ‘will of nations’ (ibid.; see Kleingeld 2006: 477).1
Rather than insisting on a constitutionalized world republic based on
coercive public laws that require demanding republican standards of
will-formation, legitimacy and publicity, then, the league of nations
that Kant proposes in ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ points to a ‘lawful
co-existence’ in the realm of international right, according to which
‘cosmopolitan citizens still need their individual republics to be citi-
zens at all’ (Benhabib 2004: 39).
Still, in both of his models, Kant views global publicity as the con-
dition for the actualization of cosmopolitan law. Recognizing pub-
lic autonomy as a prerequisite for the advancement of cosmopolitan
principles and responsibilities, such as respect for human rights, hos-
pitality and global peace, he suggests that the federation of states can

1 
To be sure, Kant also insists that the ‘rights of man must be held
sacred, however great a sacrifice the ruling power may have to make.
There can be no half measures here; it is no use devising hybrid solutions
such as a pragmatically conditioned right halfway between right and util-
ity’ (1795: 125).
 Back to Kant?  F  29

be bolstered by an emerging global public. This points beyond a mere

collection of sovereign states and collective wills. But it is too weak
to legitimate supranational coercive law and it does not necessitate a
world republic. The lawful relations among independent subjects and
republics are therefore, in Dick Howard’s words, ‘neither the result
of the subsumption of particularity under an a priori universal, nor
are they the result of the empirical deduction from pregiven facts’
(1987: 266).
At the same time, Kant also qualifies the concept of sovereignty
by introducing the cosmopolitan right to hospitality, linking peace
among states to their internal constitution and giving cross-border
relationships a significant role in delineating cosmopolitan right
(Benhabib 2004: 42). In so doing, he marks the transition from the
Westphalian model of sovereignty to a conception of ‘liberal interna-
tional sovereignty’ that makes the formal equality of states increas-
ingly dependent upon their subscribing to cosmopolitan principles of
human rights and peaceful conduct (ibid.: 41).
Habermas’ discussion of the ‘cosmopolitan condition’ takes this
‘post-sovereign’ element as its starting point. Habermas credits
Kant with taking a ‘decisive step beyond international law centred
exclusively on states’ (2006: 115). But he criticizes Kant’s frame-
work for being historically outdated and for its ‘readily apparent’
contradictory character — that is, the ‘inconsistencies’ (Habermas
1998b: 169) in both Kant’s idealist and unfeasible model of world
republicanism, which he never actually renounced as an idea, and
Kant’s later, weaker conception of a voluntary cosmopolitan federa-
tion, which functions as the negative ‘surrogate’ (Habermas 2006:
124, 129) for coercive public laws. While the first model offers an
‘overhasty concretization of the general idea of a “cosmopolitan con-
dition”’ (ibid.: 123) that smacks of idealistic utopianism, Habermas
argues that Kant’s second model is doomed to failure: ‘Just how the
permanence of this union . . . can be guaranteed without the legally
binding character of an institution analogous to a state constitution
Kant never explains’ (Habermas 1998b: 169). We are left, Habermas
claims, with an unstable constellation: cosmopolitan principles could
not endure politically and be effective without an element of bind-
ing legal obligation. A voluntary association of sovereign states based
only on each government’s moral commitments would easily fall
apart under pressure, just as the League of Nations did (ibid.).
For Habermas, the reasons that Kant gives for thinking that such
a federation could persist are implausible. An appeal to a hidden cos-
mopolitan ‘purpose of nature’ is unsatisfactory, he claims. And he
30  f  Lars Rensmann

deems Kant’s appeal to nation-states’ reason insufficient and inad-

equate, rejecting the three ‘quasi-natural tendencies’ with which
Kant attempts to explain ‘why a federation of nations could be in the
enlightened self-interest of each state’ (Habermas 1998b: 171): first,
the presumed ability of free sovereign republics to generate lawful
conditions, cosmopolitan norms and peaceful relations; second, the
power of international commerce to foster peaceful associations; and,
third, the evolution of critical public spheres that ultimately engen-
der enlightened universal ‘agreement over principles’ (Kant 1795:
114; Habermas 1998b: 176). According to Habermas, these three
assumed tendencies have been ‘falsified’ by developments in the
20th and 21st centuries, invalidating the historical premises on which
Kant’s theory is based (1998b: 171ff.). Regarding the first tendency,
Habermas argues that although constitutional republics, or ‘liberal
democracies’, indeed tend to engender non-belligerent conduct in
relations with one another, Kant did not fully grasp the ‘janus-faced’
(2001) character of nation-states — that is, the force of aggressive
nationalism that is also inscribed in the very idea of sovereign nation-
states and that has motivated modern mass atrocities. Regarding the
second tendency, Habermas points out that international capitalism
and the emergence of the world market have not only led to new
levels of global economic interdependence that might have pacify-
ing effects, but have also fostered imperialism and new social con-
flicts. Finally, regarding the third tendency, Habermas claims that
Kant relied on the transparency of a ‘surveyable public sphere’ among
educated citizens and did not anticipate its evolution into a complex
system ‘dominated by deception, (non)verbal indoctrination, digi-
tal media and pervaded by images and virtual realities’ (Habermas
1998b: 176).
Besides arguing that history has shown Kant’s non-binding and
nation-centric model to be based on outdated premises and to be
too optimistic and weak to enable a stable cosmopolitan condition,
Habermas also claims that today’s postnational constellation displays
progressive historical developments that Kant could not have antici-
pated. In particular, he claims that this constellation reflects altered
international and transnational relations in which states are no longer
the only actors, a new scope of normative and legal limitations to
national sovereignty and public autonomy and the self-reflective glo-
balization of issues and risks that humans and citizens face (ibid.:
179). Shaped by globalization’s cumulative worldwide interdepend-
encies and an increasing ‘blurring of boundaries between domestic
and foreign policy’, Habermas claims, this post-national constellation
 Back to Kant?  F  31

thus already meets ‘the constitutionalization of international law ...

halfway’ (2006: 177).

Habermas’ Models of Global Constitutionalism

and Their Democratic Deficits
Building on these developments, Habermas proposes a constitu-tion-
alization of international law as an alternative to both Kant’s earlier
notion of a legally constituted world state and his later conception
of a voluntary global federation of sovereign states, which Habermas
considers merely morally grounded and thus unstable, if not unsus-
tainable. Habermas’ cosmopolitan reconceptualiza-tion, framed as
global constitutionalism, is supposed to reflect the aforementioned
empirical developments and enable a global legal framework as well
as a ‘global domestic politics’ without appealing to idealistic con-
ceptions of world government (ibid.: 135). Indeed, as noted above,
Habermas claims that global constitutionalism has already evolved
to some extent, and needs only to be strengthened by more robust
principles and institutions. In legal terms, this process of constitu-
tionalization builds on innovations in international law since 1945,
including internationally binding conventions, treaties and char-
ters, and significant provisions in the UN context that already grant
supranational legal authority. For instance, the international legal
principle of non-intervention does not hold for members who violate
the general prohibition of the use of violence; Article 42 of the UN
Charter allows for coercive measures by the Security Council; and
Article 43, although inoperative until this day, already authorizes the
UN Security Council to take supreme command of military forces
(Habermas 2006: 163). Habermas also suggests that objective func-
tional pressures caused by global crises will motivate the evolution of
a supranational authority. On the grounds that the global community
is increasingly a community of shared risks but is organizationally
disintegrated and socially stratified, that human rights claims can no
longer be exclusively addressed on a national level and that there is
already an emergent global public sphere that could provide weak
democratic legitimation, Habermas suggests that the time is ripe
to move towards an overarching, binding cosmopolitan public law:
‘Cosmopolitan law must be institutionalized in such a way that it is
binding on the individual governments’ (1998b: 179).
In all of his constitutionalist models, Habermas proposes a multi-
level system that appeals particularly to the concept of ‘divided sov-
ereignty’. Epitomized in Kant’s time by the American constitution,
32  f  Lars Rensmann

the concept refers to forms of constitutionalism that involve not

only republican checks and balances, but also corresponding chains
of legitimation that unfold in parallel (Habermas 2006: 128). On
a global level, Habermas claims, the concept of divided sovereignty
allows us to transcend the classical antinomy between territorial pub-
lic autonomy and democratic legitimation by circumscribed popular
sovereignty, on the one hand, and legitimate global public law, on the
other, and thus to elude Kant’s ‘false choice’ between a potentially
despotic world state and the thin ‘negative substitute’ of a voluntary
association of states without proper legal force and authority.
Over the span of almost two decades, Habermas has offered two
slightly different models, as well as justifications and specifications,
of global constitutionalism. In the essay ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual
Peace’, originally published in 1996, he develops an ambitious model
of global public law to accommodate democracy’s changing condi-
tions and new global challenges, which is anchored in the democrati-
zation of central global institutions. Cosmopolitan law, then, would
treat human beings both as citizens of a state and as world citizens
in the full juridical sense, directly realizing a universal legal status as
individual subjects ‘by granting them unmediated membership in the
association of free and equal world citizens’ (Habermas 1998b: 181).
Habermas hereby seeks to resolve the structural conflict between
state sovereignty and the cosmopolitan law of a powerful world state
by pointing to new forms of divided sovereignty that reflect such dual
membership, and thus envisions a superior supranational constitu-
tionalized authority that would be capable of dealing with global
problems without necessarily creating a despotic world government.
Habermas frames this new authority and regulatory capacity in
terms of both ‘global public law’ and ‘global governance’ (1998b,
2001, 2006; Scheuerman 2008). To be politically effective, Habermas
argues, cosmopolitan law and global domestic politics require that
constitutionalized powers be supported by transparent democratic
procedures beyond ‘soft power’ (Bohman 2007), so that global insti-
tutions are democratized in a multilevel system without rendering
national citizenship and robust national democratic institutions and
publics superfluous (Habermas 1998c). In institutional terms, in
‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace’ Habermas proposes that the existing
weak links between international law and its enforcement be replaced
by a binding and democratized power — that is, a global executive
backed by a world parliament and checked by a powerful world court.
Specifically, he suggests that the UN Security Council, the General
Assembly and international criminal courts be strengthened and
 Back to Kant?  F  33

become part of an integrated global system of divided authority. First,

regarding the Security Council, he proposes that it be transformed
into an executive branch capable of deploying ‘military forces under
its own command’, exercising global police functions and imple-
menting policies and laws. In particular, the Security Council would
‘enforce the General Declaration of Human Rights, if necessary by
curtailing the sovereign power of nation-states’ (Habermas 1998b:
187ff.). Hereby, human rights violations are not just judged morally,
but prosecuted in accordance with institutionalized legal procedures
‘like criminal actions’ within a state (ibid.: 193). Given the emergence
of the concept of humanitarian interventionism in the aftermath of
the Rwanda genocide and the NATO intervention in the Kosovo cri-
sis, Habermas claims that ‘international law’s prohibition of interven-
tion is in need of revision’ (ibid.: 182). Currently, if condoned by the
UN Security Council, such interventions tend to appeal to a broad-
ened interpretation of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which refers
to measures ‘to maintain or restore international peace and security’,
rather than being based in a clear legal definition that can be effec-
tively operationalized (UN Charter, 1973: art. 39).
Second, in order to ensure the democratic legitimation of such
a reinforced executive branch and its actions, Habermas proposes
the democratization of the UN parliament and the expansion of its
authority. He criticizes the present world organization for disregard-
ing whether member states ‘have republican constitutions and respect
human rights’ — in fact, he claims, it ‘abstracts not only from the
differences in legitimacy among its members within the community
of states, but also from difference in their status within a stratified
world society’ (Habermas 1998b: 183). In response, he proposes the
establishment of two chambers to replicate the divided sovereignty
of federal state organizations: the General Assembly, today an assem-
bly of government delegations, would divide its competencies with
a democratic world parliament that would represent ‘the totality of
world citizens not by their governments but by directly elected rep-
resentatives’. Countries that refused such direct democratic elections
‘could be represented in the interim by nongovernmental organiza-
tions appointed by the World Parliament itself as the representatives
of oppressed populations’ (ibid.: 187). This democratic clause and its
procedural requirements would make universal democratic rights the
prerequisite of cosmopolitan law and global domestic politics, and
thus address the UN’s current democratic deficit.
Habermas’ third proposal in ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace’ is
that international criminal courts be institutionalized as a ‘World
34  f  Lars Rensmann

Court’ and given supreme as well as binding capacities to initiate

prosecution and exercise judicial review in areas of global public law,
particularly those concerning basic human rights. For Habermas, the
current International Criminal Court has negligible significance in
terms of its scope, judgements and formal complaint procedures,
including the individual right to appeal. While its existence points
in the right direction and demonstrates the shortcomings of Kant’s
notion of international law as a non-binding agreement among sov-
ereign entities, the court’s central authority requires reinforcement
(ibid.: 189).
This cosmopolitan model raises significant problems, however.
Habermas claims to differentiate between politics, law and moral-
ity, and thus opposes the moralization of politics not bound by the
‘real abstraction’ of general legal rules. In particular, he concedes
that global public law and human rights enforcement can be legiti-
mated only by a ‘normative agreement concerning human rights’
and a ‘shared conception of the desirable state of peace’ (Habermas
1998b: 185). He acknowledges in passing that such conceptions are
still disputed. But in contradiction to this, he simultaneously suggests
that we need not await the outcome of global public deliberation,
since we can presuppose a general agreement about human rights
norms and universal support for their global implementation by force
(ibid.: 191). Moreover, he ultimately attributes a prepolitical quality
to these norms. While recognizing that the existing Security Council
uses its discretion in a ‘highly selective manner’ (ibid.: 180), he ulti-
mately doubts that the content of human rights and their universal
application can be subjected to political contestation. Human rights,
he argues, regulate matters of such generality that they can be suf-
ficiently justified and constitutionally legitimated by rational moral
arguments, which show that they are ‘equally good for everybody
(ibid.: 191ff.). Despite this moral content, Habermas also under-
stands human rights as an essentially ‘juridical concept’ because they
are reflective of the modern concept of individual liberties and he
presupposes that their content forms the constitutive general norm
for any legal order. For him, they only appear as moral rights, rather
than legal rights, because of their validity beyond the legal orders of
nation-states and their special justificatory status (ibid.: 190).
Thus, Habermas ultimately prioritizes classical prepolitical, foun-
dationalist liberal rights — philosophically grounded in ‘rational’
moral claims — over public autonomy, suspending his deliberative-
democratic co-originality claim that ‘private and public autonomy
presuppose each other in such a way that neither human rights nor
 Back to Kant?  F  35

popular sovereignty can claim primacy over its counterpart’ (1998a:

261). Moral universalism hereby regains its metaphysical foundation,
as it escapes the sphere of political contestation and enters a prepoliti-
cally justified, universally juridified and allegedly neutrally applicable
form of law above politics. By presupposing what he considers to be
the rational outcome of reasonable public will-formation, namely, the
standards, procedures and enforcement of human rights, Habermas
thus envisions a rational universal standard to be executed by central-
ized global authorities that bypasses decentred democratic control,
robust global public accountability and political responsibility for the
consequences of military interventions.
It is not clear how his transfer of power and competencies to cen-
tralized global agencies can be sufficiently legitimized in light of
Habermas’ own theory, his innovative conception of a democratized
world parliament notwithstanding. On the one hand, he insists that
a more robust global public sphere is ‘urgently needed’ to legitimize
global domestic politics and law, recognizing the current structural
weaknesses of global publics. On the other hand, he declares that
a weak global public sphere is sufficient for global institutions and
public law to be legitimate, as long as their functions are circum-
scribed to issues of global concern. But according to Habermas’ own
discursive theory of deliberative democracy, those affected by a norm
or decision should be able to participate in deliberation over it, and
this requires sufficiently robust communicative communities. Even
on the national level, these are often dysfunctional and shaped by
vast inequalities and exclusions. At the global level, issues of distance,
access and language, as well as of complexity and transparency, com-
plicate even minimum conditions of public will-formation, while
participation among formally equal world citizens and attention to
global issues remains largely filtered through national publics.
In ‘Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have
a Chance?’, originally published in 2004, and subsequent work on the
subject, Habermas seeks to revise and specify his model of cosmopoli-
tan constitutionalism, partly in response to some of the problems of
his earlier, more ambitious global democracy model. Again, rejecting
both a world constitutional state on the one hand and a voluntary
confederation of independent states on the other, Habermas’ revised
model sharpens the distinction between an undesirable constitutional
world state and a ‘politically constituted world society’ (2006: 118), a
distinction he claims that Kant did not appreciate. The constitutional-
ized international law and reformed world organization that Habermas
proposes do not have the self-legislating political competencies of a
36  f  Lars Rensmann

democratic constitutional state and their state-like qualities are sup-

posed to be restricted to a few ‘clearly circumscribed functions’ (ibid.:
136). The political constitution of a decentred world society is con-
ceived as a multilevel system in which nation-states remain prominent
political actors in the global legal order, and which ‘for good reason
lacks the character of a state as a whole’ (Habermas 2006: 136).
However, Habermas continues to endorse the binding constitutional
authority of supranational institutions, while also limiting their scope
more strictly to matters of gross human rights violations and securing
global peace. His proposal now relegates other global concerns, such as
global economic justice or global environmental policy, to non-binding
forums, rather than considering them subject to the policy-making of
a democratized global parliament, and he also lowers the democracy
requirements of global institutions. Thus, as David Ingram points out,
Habermas’ defence of a cosmopolitan constitutional regime hinges on
two assumptions: the functional assumption that global crises will
motivate the evolution of supranational competencies to deal with
them, and the normative assumption that ‘a world security and human
rights regime can be legitimated prepolitically, by direct appeal to
universally acknowledged human rights principles, and politically, by
indirect appeal to a “weak” global public opinion’ (Ingram 2010: 301).
In the self-understanding of a constitutional state, the horizontal
association of citizens who, as subjects and authors of the law, mutu-
ally grant each other rights lawfully, domesticates hierarchical state
organizations in which political power is exercised and policies imple-
mented (Habermas 2006: 131). By contrast, Haber- mas argues, the
process of constitutionalization and juridification of global politics
that promote peace and guarantee human rights points in an oppo-
site genealogical direction: it proceeds from the ‘non-hierarchical
association of collective actors to the supra- and transnational organi-
zations of a cosmopolitan order’ (ibid.: 133). This process has a fun-
damentally different starting point, namely, classical international
law’s recognition of sovereign states. While classical international
law already recognizes a kind of fragmentary proto-constitution by
upholding a quasi-legal community with formally equal rights, its
actors are collective and its self-obligations lack ‘the binding force
of reciprocal legal obligations’ (ibid.). What is missing, then, is not
a constitution that founds an association of free and equal citizens
under law, but stronger supranational mandates for governance that
domesticate non-hierarchical actors from above without adopting
comprehensive state functions. In Habermas’ words, there is a need
for regulating authorities ‘above competing states that would equip
 Back to Kant?  F  37

the international community with the executive and sanctioning

powers required to implement and enforce its rules and decisions’
(Habermas 2006: 132).
While it seeks to protect the rights of human beings as world citi-
zens — cosmopolitan law as the law of individuals is to trump sov-
ereign state power — Habermas’ revised model ‘reserves institutions
and procedures of global governance for states at both supra- and
transnational levels’, states thus being ‘bound by consensual norm’,
but ‘not relegated to mere parts of an overarching hierarchical super-
state’ (ibid.: 135). Global constitutionalism should neither entail the
complete mediatization of law through a world republic nor ignore
the particular trust and loyalty of citizens towards their nation-states.
Indeed, Habermas claims that the juridification of world politics must
take as its starting point ‘individuals and states as the two categories
of founding subjects of a world constitution’ (2008: 449, emphasis in
original). In particular, he specifies three levels of a global constitu-
tional order, referring to different institutions, legal responsibilities
and legitimization procedures. First, the constitutionalized world
organization has the responsibility to ensure that basic human rights
are respected worldwide ‘in an effective and non-selective fashion’
(Habermas 2006: 136) and that international peace is preserved. The
universal validity and legitimacy of its laws is bolstered by the articu-
lated solidarity of world citizens and their moral public outrage in
the face of mass violence and gross human rights violations, although
Habermas holds that such global law requires only weak democratic
legitimation. Second, below the global authority’s state-like func-
tions of securing peace and human rights, Habermas reserves space
for ‘global domestic politics without world government’. Such govern-
ance involves policy-making at the intermediate, transnational level
that facilitates conflict-mediating negotiation, domesticates major
powers and includes forums for global dialogue about the meaning
of UN principles and global problems. Global politics should not
be restricted to mere coordination, he claims, but also actively rec-
tify global disparities and address global problems, from the global
economy to ecology. Yet he no longer envisions these policy arenas
as being subjected to the binding global authority and to the legisla-
tive procedures advanced by an originally envisioned democratized
global parliament, although he does suggest that transnational pol-
icy-making requires a higher level of legitimation than cosmopolitan
law’s universal human rights. As a transnational regime with repre-
sentative mandates, he sees the EU as an institutional model for this
intermediate level. Third, and finally, along with leverage in global
38  f  Lars Rensmann

institutions, Habermas claims that sovereign states should retain

much of their self-legislating authority.
The global constitutional order that Habermas envisions will
most certainly not satisfy Kant’s standards of publicity and ‘repub-
lican standards of democratic legitimation’ (2006: 139). To be sure,
Habermas continues to insist that global public law should not be
completely detached from democratic legitimation, however weak.
If a global constitution is to be anything more than a legal facade of
global hegemony, he argues, it must ‘remain tied at least indirectly to
processes of legitimation within constitutional states . . . and retains
a derivative status because it depends on “advances” of legitimation
from democratic constitutional states’ (ibid.: 139-41). Yet this does
not translate into robust democratic institutional prerequisites or pro-
cedures, while Habermas’ revised model grants a significant transfer
to central global authorities and also upholds significant powers for
state governments, irrespective of their internal constitutions. For,
ultimately, Habermas now considers human rights norms, equipped
with ‘supraposi- tive validity’ (1998b: 189), and the weak, indirect
legitimation of the Security Council and the General Assembly,
provided by a ‘well-informed’ global public, sufficient to legitimize
the activity of a powerful, centralized world organization, as long as
the latter ‘restricts itself to the most elementary tasks of securing
peace and human rights on a global scale’ (2006: 174). Habermas
now renounces more robust democratic control mechanisms, such
as reforming the UN’s General Assembly and supplementing it with
a democratically legitimized world parliament that excludes non-
elected representatives and checks the small power elite of a reformed
executive and world court. Instead, he insists that it is more ‘realistic’
and, indeed, a necessary precondition in order to ‘channel conflicts
into civilized procedures’ and ‘transform international conflicts into
domestic conflicts’ that all regimes be admitted as equal members
into the legislative body without meeting democratic prerequisites;
representatives need not be democratically elected or represent a
state that respects human rights at any level (ibid.: 165).
Rather than expanding the role of democratic participation in
global politics, then, Habermas’ later model reduces it. Indeed, he
himself recognizes that membership of undemocratic states in the
Security Council and the unconditional inclusive membership in the
parliamentary assembly he now advocates would both impair the dem-
ocratic legitimacy of global institutions and harm precisely the univer-
sal validity of the basic human rights he seeks to protect (Habermas
2006: 163). Granting equal political rights to despotic regimes that
 Back to Kant?  F  39

are undemocratic and violate human rights makes a mockery of those

rights claims, much as did seats for states like Syria in the UN General
Assembly’s subsidiary bodies dealing with human rights. Behind
Habermas’ formalized legal principles, politics thus reappears through
the backdoor and negatively affects the recognition and realization of
human rights that he appeals to. Moreover, while Habermas accuses
Kant of relying on good-will among republican states, it is unclear
what institutional mechanisms beyond good-will are now supposed to
ensure that a reformed Security Council enforces human rights non-
selectively and acts ‘independently of national interests in its choice of
agenda and its resolutions’ (ibid.: 173).
Reiterating and reinforcing his earlier assumptions, Habermas also
suggests that the global normative agreement concerning the juridi-
cal character, scope and validity of basic human rights has already
become reality. Most importantly, he extends this presupposed uni-
versally valid agreement without qualification to the rules and crite-
ria for the global enforcement of human rights, subjected only to the
judicial oversight of independent judges who are apparently to serve as
unbiased Platonic guardians of those rights: ‘We can take for granted
that these basic rights are accepted as valid worldwide and that the
judicial oversight of the enforcement of law for its part follows rules
that are recognized as legitimate’ (ibid.: 174). In this model, decisions
about global humanitarian interventions can be delegated to execu-
tive agencies and to judges who, as interpreters of universal ‘cosmo-
politan law’, approve or reject the application of the global use of
force according to uncontested formal standards. Habermas hereby
reduces complex human rights politics to the application of formal
legal principles and global law enforcement.
Seeking to be more ‘realistic’ than his earlier, more far-reaching
conception of global democracy, then, Habermas’ revised model of
cosmopolitan constititutionalism strictly circumscribes the areas
subject to universal jurisdiction and eliminates the democracy condi-
tions on membership of the world organization and global parliament
that he had previously proposed. But this ‘realism’ risks dramatic
consequences. Abandoning any institutional device to control abuse,
Habermas’ global constitutionalism proposes a significant transfer
of authority to supranational institutions, centralizing global power
in the areas of peace, security and human rights. While his model
negates the still contested character of these global challenges and
conflicts, it threatens to suffocate the space for human rights poli-
tics. By conceiving of and justifying cosmopolitan law largely in terms
of a fixed and universally enforceable set of liberal rights that are
40  f  Lars Rensmann

grounded in prepolitical normative validity, it escapes political con-

testation with regard to both substance and application. Such politi-
cal closure ultimately grants excess power to a small elite of global
leaders and governments — both democratic and undemocratic —
without the necessary procedures to democratically tame it or expose
it to procedural justification pressures. In fact, even more so than in
his earlier model, Habermas seeks to juridify key areas of global poli-
tics from the top down, while weakening the democratic legitimation
and public autonomy that could be, as Kant suggests, the strongest
interlocutor for cosmopolitan norms and human rights.

Cosmopolitanism from Below: Rethinking

Global Politics and Human Rights
While Habermas is right to point to sociocultural, economic and legal
conditions of world society that Kant could not have anticipated, his
own ‘top-down’ conception of cosmopolitanism as a global constitu-
tionalization suffers from democratic deficits that Kant’s ‘bottom-up’
conception might serve to remedy, with its emphasis on the exercise
of public autonomy by demoi and multitudes in the legitimation of
cosmopolitan law. For Kant’s conception recuperates the concern for
democratic legitimacy that Habermas pursues in his theory of state
politics, but neglects in his conception of global politics. It thus not
only cautions us of the failure of the current ‘global public’ to meet
even weak democratic legitimacy requirements, let alone demanding
procedural requirements of transcultural dialogue, but also responds
to the need for actual, political interpretations of abstract rights and
rules for particular contexts through democratic will-formation.
Habermas’ global constitutionalism, especially in its most recent
reformulation, largely leaves ‘the question of democratic legiti-
macy unanswered’ and fails to adequately recognize the ‘necessity
for mediating international norms through the will formation of
democratic peoples’, as Seyla Benhabib has put it (2009: 693, 696).
Furthermore, if a small circle of global leaders and supposedly neu-
tral judges were to have the authority to rigorously apply formalized
criteria for global human rights enforcement without accountable
public deliberation about its implications, this could possibly enable
endless ‘humanitarian interventions’ — something to which the UN,
as the centralized global institution in which Habermas invests so
much hope, has not yet shown itself to be particularly well-disposed,
or at least not in an unbiased way. Unlike Kant, then, Habermas ulti-
mately tends to subsume the particular under the general or abstract,
 Back to Kant?  F  41

instead of engendering universality through the particular, and does

not leave sufficient space for universality’s self-reflection. To be sure,
it is humanity’s unconditional responsibility to secure all individu-
als and groups against genocide and other crimes against humanity;
this cannot be dependent upon democratic majorities (Adorno 1973:
365). But while military assistance can certainly be legitimated if
called for by persecuted communities who face gross human atroci-
ties, the application of prepolitical formal principles ‘from above’
must always remain ambiguous until critical public reflection and
judgements about the means and consequences of such actions have
also been provided — reflection and judgements about the specific
ramifications for concrete subjects, the risk of causing more violence
to human lives and the actual chances of bringing lasting improve-
ments in human rights (Ignatieff 2000).
Alternative approaches absorb Habermas’ cosmopolitan inten-
tions whilst emphasizing the political moment in Kant’s concep-
tion. They suggest that global constitutionalism can at best play an
auxiliary role in pursuing human rights, at least in the absence of
a robust global public. Endorsing global human rights conventions,
they oppose sovereigntist cultural relativism, but are also sceptical
of any abstract universalism that relies too heavily on prepolitical
metaphysical foundations. Such a grounded, ‘bottom-up’ cosmopoli-
tanism attributes special relevance to the translation of cosmopoli-
tan norms and their specific vernacularizations in diverse collective
self-understandings and political or constitutional contexts, as well
as in public spaces in which ‘communities in action’ either exercise,
or struggle to obtain, the fundamental human right to political voice
and freedom from physical harm (Benhabib 2009; Merry 2006;
Rensmann 2012). Habermas’ own discursive theory of deliberative
democracy, which allocates a central place to self-legislating subjects
in culturally grounded communicative communities, can hereby
function as a critical resource to challenge the democratic deficits in
his global constitutionalism.
As Benhabib has emphasized, human rights can be contextualized
without yielding to cultural relativism by focusing on their ‘jurisgen-
erative power’ and on democratic iterations in diverse constitutional
contexts. These contexts are distinguished by situated meanings,
layers, appropriations and translations of cosmopolitan claims in
multiple publics and languages, within and across territorial and
legal boundaries (Benhabib 2011). The more culturally embedded
transnationally active human rights and feminist groups are within a
state, the more effective is their capacity to incorporate cosmopolitan
42  f  Lars Rensmann

norms in local struggles (Benhabib 2009: 700; Moghadam 2009).

The vernacularization of cosmopolitan claims can also push beyond
the horizon and content that liberal cosmopolitans envision, and even
need not preclude extrajudicial transformative practices that funda-
mentally challenge existing political orders (Rensmann 2012). The
political significance of cosmopolitan claims in fact often rests on
their unruly articulations by struggling communities that, emerging
unpredictably, act in concert while challenging conventions as well as
ruling authorities and global expert opinions.
As significant recent examples of this, the Iranian uprising, the
Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Arab Spring more gener-
ally have shown that self-constituting democratic multitudes often
mobilize cosmopolitan human rights claims from below, generat-
ing new public spaces and agreements while acting against existing
legal processes and systems of rule whose legitimacy is irreversibly
exhausted. Such unrest points to an extraordinary cosmopolitics:
legal transgressions that appropriate and collectively legitimate
human rights claims under conditions in which authoritarian
regimes persecute minorities or deny political freedom. Formal
rights enabling due process, the rule of law and legal stability can
matter tremendously in protecting individuals and groups from
arbitrary rule — indeed, failing states often allow for the worst
human rights violations. But under conditions of violent authori-
tarian ‘outlaw states’ (Rawls 2001), democratic appropriations of
cosmopolitan claims often do not function in as neat and orderly a
way as we might hope. Especially where the rule of law no longer
guarantees viable rights, they may be messy and chaotic. If citizens
refuse to subjugate themselves to legal obligations they no longer
accept as legitimate, this may also indicate that formal rules and
rights do not mean much if they are not supported by a culture
of solidarity, responsibility and transparency. And these rules and
rights may depend on the fundamentally unsettling power of con-
tingent self-constituting publics that subvert existing legal bounda-
ries or resort to extralegal means. Transnational networks that act
in solidarity and help dismantle repressive regimes can thus display
crucial supportive functions.
The democratic yet militant uprising in Libya shows that a cosmo-
politanism sensitive to difference will also raise significant dilemmas.
While cosmopolitanism from below is generally oriented at local
democratic public mediations and the reduction of violence, in cases
of persecution and gross human rights violations global interference
 Back to Kant?  F  43

can become strongly legitimated if it is induced by the voices of per-

secuted minorities and self-constituting democratic multitudes. Such
requests are both more legitimate and more significant than appeals
to formal principles inspired by Habermas’ global constitutionalism.
Furthermore, cosmopolitan translations and re-articulations can
also challenge the content and scope of ‘basic human rights’ in unpre-
dictable ways. To employ the terms of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of
the Translator’ (1968), cosmopolitan claims express human experi-
ences and purposes only if more layers are added to the original —
more voices, more languages and more translations — rather than by
eliminating new interpretations and cultural appropriations, reduc-
ing them to an abstract commonality or formal principle or seeking to
recover any presumed ‘original’ cultural meaning. For instance, local
and transnational political communities have often articulated more
demanding conceptions of human rights and dignity in their strug-
gles against authoritarian rule, or against economic forms of domina-
tion that fall outside the minimalist definitions of Habermas’ liberal
global constitutionalism.
Of course, global institutional and legal reforms such as those to
which Habermas gestures are significant if Kant’s cosmopolitan pro-
ject is ever to be transferred into the contemporary horizon.
In the face of crimes against humanity and nation-states’ roles in
them, the responsibility to guarantee the universal ‘human right’ to
membership, to ‘have rights’, has to a considerable extent shifted to
humanity as a whole (Arendt 1968: 297ff.). Human rights regimes
can also play a positive role in advancing cosmopolitan causes and
engendering national legal claims to human dignity, and more effec-
tive global regulatory regimes may help to tame, for instance, global
social inequalities and the crises caused by unregulated global
finance and markets that nation-states can no longer domesticate.
But we also need to take Kant’s reservations about coercive cosmo-
politan law seriously. Global agreements about cosmopolitan norms
are possible, but they require actual (trans)national communica-
tion and agency, and often involve struggles and contestations. It
is important to prevent what Herbert Marcuse calls the ‘closing of
the political universe’ (1964: 19, 32) — that is, the neutralizing of
domination through forms of legalism which establish incontest-
able formal principles and administrative procedures while exclud-
ing and concealing underlying problems of democratic legitimation
and transparency, global social and political asymmetries, and
the critical voices reflecting them. ‘Deprovincializing’ Habermas’
44  f  Lars Rensmann

cosmopolitanism thus also means turning to marginalized political

subjectivities and publics which challenge various forms of domi-
nation, exclusion and genocidal persecution, and which legitimate
claims to human rights and dignity by articulating, interpreting and
vernacularizing them in (trans-)national political struggles. Rather
than pursuing an integrated global system concerned with enforc-
ing pre-political formal principles from above, the primary task of
global political theorists today may well be to pursue a cosmopol-
itanism ‘from below’, reconstructing the multiple legal and non-
legal ways in which local and transnational interlocutors can help to
actualize cosmopolitan claims and solidarity in a decentred world
society.

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2
Democratizing International Law
A Republican Reading of Habermas’
Cosmopolitan Project
James Bohman

In the early 1990s, social scientists and philosophers began to see

globalization as a process that transforms social space and time, chal-
lenging the assumption of independent and sovereign states and cre-
ating a global human rights regime and global civil society. Indeed,
states now seem both too big and too small: too big to generate the
loyalty and legitimacy necessary for a demanding democratic ideal,
and too small to solve a myriad of social problems. Powerful multi-
national corporations evade state power, while international financial
institutions dictate the terms of cooperation to weak states. Indeed,
in the interest of promoting free markets and trade, states now often
voluntarily delegate their powers to these bodies. Such policies are
often challenged by anti-globalization protesters in the name of local
control and democracy, and, certainly, what unites these diverse phe-
nomena is a shift to forms of political authority that are no longer
accountable to a measure of popular influence and control — an
accountability that is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for any
form of democracy.
Jürgen Habermas has consistently considered these develop-
ments in the light of Immanuel Kant’s project for the creation of a
‘cosmopolitan condition’ — that is, the project of pacifying conflict
by extending republican freedom beyond the modern state. Kant
already envisioned the possible emergence of a global public sphere,
in which human rights violations ‘in one part of the world will be felt
everywhere’ (Kant 1971: 103). Yet while this global public sphere
provides a necessary condition for a political order beyond the state
(Habermas 2006: 109-10), it does not identify the central concern of
the Kantian project, which, in Habermas’ terms, is the constitution-
alization of international law.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-4
48  f  James Bohman

In order to understand Habermas’ contribution to debates sur-

rounding international law, it is helpful to consider the development
of his views on this issue over the last two decades. In the first of
a series of essays on the ‘Kantian project’ (Habermas 1997: 113-
54), he claimed that the constitutionalization of international law
would require cosmopolitan democracy. A reformed United Nations
would see its institutions reproducing parliamentary democracy,
with the General Assembly as its legislative branch, various world
and international courts, and the Security Council as its executive.
But Habermas soon came to see that such an extension of democ-
racy beyond the state could not be achieved so easily, especially given
the explicitly state-oriented conception of democracy that he had
developed in Between Facts and Norms (1996). He concluded that
the modern conception of democracy, according to which citizens are
both authors and subjects of the law, cannot be extended beyond a
delimited political community of free and equal citizens.
These conceptual difficulties raise the problem of the possible
legitimation of international law in Habermas’ Kantian project. For
the project must be given form in legal institutions with binding pow-
ers, and therefore, at the very least, the legitimate basis of constitu-
tionalization with regard to a comprehensive world society must be
established. Yet whatever role law is to play in this legitimization, it
will not be a traditionally democratic one, as the product of the will
of a delimited people.
Having returned repeatedly to the Kantian project in the last dec-
ade, Habermas now conceives it as the transformation of international
law from the law of states into cosmopolitan law in which individuals
are its legal subjects, rather than a strong cosmopolitan version of
the democratic project. While important, he now sees democracy as
lending only indirect legitimacy, since it can no longer be the outcome
of constitutionalization at the global level. Rather than constitute the
global demos that makes itself the author and subject of the law, then,
constitutionalization is not about global democracy so much as the
mutual limitation of the exercise of power at various levels, includ-
ing the democratic power of states. Habermas now sees popular and
public accountability as a function of ‘global domestic politics’, while
assigning formal and legal global institutions the task of promoting
human rights and security.
In discussing Habermas’ developing position, my aim in this chap-
ter is to reveal how he gradually shifts from his initial Kantian posi-
tion, which aimed at the transformation of political authority, to a
position whose goal is solely the protection of human rights. I will
 Democratizing International Law  F  49

consider this development in the light of the two major alternatives

that have emerged in recent debates — the ‘maximalism’ about cos-
mopolitan institutions which Habermas first shared with David Held,
and the ‘minimalism’ of John Rawls and Allen Buchanan that emerged
later. To the extent that Habermas sees democracy in nation-states
as decentred, it is open to him to occupy an intermediate position
between maximalism and minimalism. While his attempts to find
a ‘less demanding form of legitimacy’ (Habermas 2001: 156) than
democratic self-determination for a political world society at times
suggest a kind of minimalism, I will argue that his own position more
properly requires the recovery of certain advantages of the maximal-
ist position, even as it provides an alternative and more minimalist
account of transnational political authority and institutions.

From Cosmopolitan Democracy

to International Politics
Since Habermas’ position has undergone significant development
over the years, it is worth beginning by locating his current position
in relation to the range of theories that developed only after his first
discussion of Kantian cosmopolitan law. These theories are informed
by different background assumptions about whether cosmopolitan-
ism is ‘moral’, in that it is concerned with individuals and their life
opportunities; ‘social’, in that it makes associations and institutions
central; or ‘political’, in that it focuses on specifically legal and politi-
cal institutions, including citizenship. I believe that none of the the-
ories currently available articulates a plausible transformationalist
position that provides the right sort of institutional mechanisms to
convert the outcomes of democratic political processes at the global
level into legitimate political power. Yet while opposed substantively
to each other, I will argue that each of these theories fails for com-
plementary reasons, and that an alternative account can therefore be
developed that incorporates the strengths of each while overcoming
their fundamental weaknesses.
The best minimalist position is found in Buchanan’s recent work
on democracy in the international arena. This minimalist impulse
also informs Rawls’ work, so much so that both Buchanan and Rawls
are best thought of as social, rather than political, cosmopolitans.
While Rawls proposes that we should determine the basic struc-
ture of institutions according to what peoples would agree to in the
original position, he tempers his minimalism by asserting the fact
of pluralism at the international level, and thus leaves no room for
50  f  James Bohman

genuinely political and democratic institutions outside of states that

organize peoples. Rawls’ Millian claim that politics depends on ‘com-
mon sentiments’, and his Kantian claim about the limits of size for
legislation, further entrench his minimalism. Buchanan endorses this
same moral minimalism about basic rights, but disagrees about ‘how
minimal this minimum is’ (2004: 176). The next step for Buchanan
is nonetheless to accept a minimal justification of democracy on the
instrumental grounds that democracy is fundamentally moral, inso-
far as it protects ‘basic’ human rights through the ‘right combination’
of representative institutions; these institutions are said to ‘most reli-
ably achieve the accountability necessary for protecting basic human
rights’, understood as basic interests that are essential to leading a
decent human life (ibid.: 189). Thus, Buchanan is also a political cos-
mopolitan who endorses political rights and democratic institutions
as necessary for the accountability of any institution, including inter-
national ones.
Such an instrumental justification is insufficient on its own terms.
If among human rights we include political rights and the right to
democracy itself, as Buchanan suggests, then democracy is not merely
a means to realize human rights, but constitutive of them. Such an
instrumental justification cannot justify the full democratic entitle-
ment typically recognized in international law, to the extent that it
permits, as Buchanan admits, tradeoffs in the international system
between ‘the capacity to protect basic human rights and building its
capacity for democratic governance’ (2004: 189). If democracy were
indeed a basic human right, then these tradeoffs would be contradic-
tory. Moreover, even the most minimal democracy presupposes the
very rights that it is supposed to protect. As even Joseph Schumpeter
admits, for example, free competitive elections ‘presuppose a con-
siderable amount of freedom of discussion for all’ (1947: 271-72).
On the same grounds, the instrumental justification of democracy as
protecting human rights cannot be sufficient, since democracy also
directly instantiates political rights, such as the rights of association,
participation and expression, among many others. The justification
of democracy in terms of human rights is thus unavoidably intrinsic
as well as instrumental; as in the case of justice and democracy, one
cannot be realized without the other.
Given the intrinsic justification of democracy and the constitutive
features of citizenship that are necessary for accountability, demo-
cratic minimalism fails to provide a sufficiently robust conception of
democracy, leaving the institutional and political bases of accountabil-
ity unexplored. The central feature of democratic accountability that
 Democratizing International Law  F  51

political rights enable is a distinctive form of reflexivity. Reflexivity

does not ensure directly that citizens are protected and that institu-
tions act according to their basic interests, but rather that they are
jointly empowered to refashion the terms and rules of democratic
governance itself. Indeed, social scientific generalizations about the
protective effects of democracy in cases of famine or war point, not
to the efficacy of representative institutions as such or even to that
of the rule of law, but rather to the importance of creating the condi-
tions for an active citizenry with robust powers and entitlements that
secure accountability through better democratic practice (Sen 1999).
This form of moderate maximalism regarding democracy is purely
instrumental.
A second conception is more thoroughly maximalist and politi-
cal, in that it endorses an intrinsic justification of democracy, guided
by a particular ideal of a self-determining people who govern them-
selves by acts of legislation. Democracy on the nation-state model
connects three central ideas: that the proper political community is a
bounded one; that it possesses ultimate political authority; and that
this authority enables political autonomy, so that the members of
the demos may ‘choose freely the conditions of their own association’
(Held 1995: 145). The normative core of this conception of democ-
racy is the conception of freedom articulated in the third condition:
that the subject of the constraints of law is free precisely in being the
author of the laws.
This conception of democracy was employed by Habermas in his
early work on the cosmopolitan project and although, under the pres-
sures of pluralism and complexity, he has since come to argue for a
‘decentring’ of democracy at the global level, when discussing ‘post-
national’ legitimacy he still makes self-determination by a singular
demos the fundamental normative core of the democratic ideal. In
both his later book, The Postnational Constellation, and more recent
essays on the European Union, Habermas seeks to accommodate
wider institutional pluralism (Habermas 2006: 113-94). Still, he
cannot have it both ways, and his view shifts in his later work. When
considering various disaggregated and distributed forms of transna-
tional political order, he describes them in non-democratic terms,
as a ‘negotiating system’ governed by fair bargaining, and therefore
not as directly democratic. This is because he clearly — and, indeed,
surprisingly — accepts that self-determination through legislation is
the deciding criterion of democracy, leaving ‘a fair system of negotia-
tion’ among democracies as the fundamental form of political activity
at the transnational level. Even given that this demos is at best a civic
52  f  James Bohman

one, he nonetheless links the possibility of a ‘postnational democ-

racy’ to a shared, and therefore particular, political identity, without
which, he contends, we are left with mere ‘moral’, rather than ‘civic’,
solidarity. According to Habermas, even if such a political commu-
nity is based on the universal principles of a democratic constitu-
tion, ‘it still forms a collective identity, in the sense that it interprets
and realizes these principles in light of its history and in the con-
text of its own particular form of life’ (2001: 107, 117). Without a
common ethical basis, institutions beyond the state must look to a
‘less demanding basis for legitimacy in the organizational forms of an
international negotiation system’, the deliberative processes of which
will be accessible to various publics and to organizations in interna-
tional civil society (ibid.: 109).
As we shall see, in his more recent works Habermas argues that
regulatory political institutions at the global level will only be effec-
tive if they take on features of governance without government, even
if human rights as juridical statuses must be constitutionalized in the
international system (2006: 130-31). As in the case of Buchanan’s
and Rawls’ minimalism, this less demanding standard of legitimacy
does not include the capacity to deliberate about the terms govern-
ing the political authority of the negotiation system itself. This posi-
tion is cosmopolitan, but it is ultimately non-democratic, primarily
because it restricts its robust conception of deliberative democracy to
the level of the nation-state. This conception is not applied outside
the nation-state, where governance is only indirectly democratic and
left to intergovernmental negotiations and policy networks. However,
Habermas’ commitment to human rights as legal statuses initially
pushes him in the direction of Held’s fundamentally legal form of
democratic political cosmopolitanism.
Held’s work on cosmopolitan democracy provides a more com-
plete account than the two minimalist democratic positions that I
have mentioned. It takes a ‘maximalist’ position on global democ-
racy, much like Habermas’ earlier work. But it is also more closely
tied to an empirical examination of the impacts of globalization
than Habermas’ primarily conceptual claims, and thus does not so
readily adopt the metaphysical assumptions of social contract the-
ory. Not only does Held show how international society is already
thickly institutionalized well beyond the systems of negotiation that
Habermas makes central, but he also recognizes that ‘individuals
increasingly have complex and multilayered identities, correspond-
ing to the globalization of economic forces and the reconfiguration
of political power’ (Held and McGrew 2002: 95). Such potentially
 Democratizing International Law  F  53

overlapping identities are the basis for participation in global civil

society, in nongovernmental organizations and in other transna-
tional civil associations, movements and agencies that create oppor-
tunities for political participation at the global level. The enormous
advantages of Held’s approach over those of Rawls, Buchanan and
Habermas are thus threefold: an emphasis on a variety of institutions;
a multiplicity of levels and sites for common democratic activity; and
a focus on the need for organized political actors in international civil
society and public spheres to play an important role in a system of
global democracy.
Nonetheless, for all these advantages, the self-legislating demos
also reappears in Held’s explicitly Lockean insistence that ‘the artifi-
cial person at the centre of the modern state must be reconceived in
terms of cosmopolitan public law’ (1995: 234). When does this artifi-
cial person become a demos with supreme power? In Held’s view, this
political subject becomes more abstract. It is not manifested in indi-
vidual legislative acts, but in making the global political framework
itself the subject of popular will and consent. Once legitimated, this
political subject emerges within a ‘common structure for political
action’ that enables individuals and groups to pursue their individual
and collective projects (ibid.: 145). The framework itself functions as
a would-be sovereign rather than a distributed process of will forma-
tion, since sovereignty is now ‘an attribute of democratic public law’
(ibid.: 145-46). In order to reconstitute the community as sovereign,
Held argues that the demoi must submit to the will of the global
demos: ‘cosmopolitan law demands the subordination of regional,
national and local sovereignties to an overarching legal framework’
(ibid.: 154, 236).
That this framework is both ‘legal’ and ‘overarching’ raises a poten-
tial democratic dilemma for such a global demos. In order to be over-
arching, the framework must instantiate a hierarchy of authority. But
in order to be democratic, the framework will have to pass through
the collective will and reason of its citizens, thereby recreating at
the global level the contractual moment of a determinate ‘people’
granting each other their mutual rights. Insofar as it is subject to this
democratic requirement, the exact character of the rights and obliga-
tions that the common structure of political action involves cannot
be conclusively determined. At the same time, however, in order to
be enforceable, these rights and duties must be specified in some way
by an authoritative institution which possesses the competence to do
so, and which must therefore act both legislatively and judicially. The
dilemma can be put this way: if it acts judicially, Held’s framework
54  f  James Bohman

seems undemocratic; yet if it acts legislatively, it has no special demo-

cratic status over other legitimately constituted legislative wills.
Thus, Held’s demand for democratic control over ‘the overarching
general legal framework’ creates a fundamental continuity between
democracy within the nation-state and beyond it, but does so at a high
price. In particular, it makes second-order questions about the frame-
work somehow different from first-order ones, matters to be settled
impartially that somehow rise above the fray of everyday democratic
conflicts. Higher-level international politics are thus adjudicative,
rather than deliberative. This introduces a fundamental disanalogy
with other cases of democratic self-determination: no such separa-
tion exists in a constitutional democracy that institutionalizes reflex-
ivity by its openness to revision and amendment. At best, this legal
framework recreates the weakness of the state within a dispersed
international society, recentring rather than decentring and dispers-
ing democratic authority. Even if such a body were to exist, and even
if it were somehow adequately representative, its judgements would
always be made in terms of modes of institutionalized representation
that abstract from the relations and networks that make up interna-
tional society. Such a dispersed and diverse polity requires a much
more differentiated democratic structure, insofar as it cannot exer-
cise the power of the demos without being a potential dominator.
Although in his more recent book, The Global Covenant (2004), Held
emphasizes multilevel and polycentric governance as more necessary
in the short-and medium-term than global parliamentary institu-
tions, he still employs the same conception of cosmopolitan self-leg-
islation as fundamental to a long-term global democratic order. Thus,
it seems that in a period when even democracy at the state level is
disaggregated and decentred, in Held’s hands the cosmopolitan con-
ception of democracy is not sufficiently reformulated, and thus risks
increasing, rather than decreasing, the problems of domination facing
the contemporary world.

Constitutionalizing International Law:

With or Without Democracy?
Habermas has recently developed a more systematic version of his
Kantian cosmopolitan project in a multilevel ‘politically constituted
world society’ (2006: 118). In such a multilevel order, states have an
important role to play as ‘the most important actors and final arbi-
ters’, precisely because they have solved the problem of legitimate
power by means of law (ibid.: 176). Even so, these resources are no
 Democratizing International Law  F  55

longer adequate to the task of solving the many problems created

by globalization, including the various risks created by cross-border
transactions and the migration of peoples.
At least two further levels of institutions are necessary for a com-
plete picture of a global order, the transnational and the suprana-
tional. While Habermas does not ignore these two levels, he now
more clearly accepts much of the existing formal institutionalization.
By ‘supranational’, he means those executive and judicial aspects of
the United Nations that make it a fully inclusive ‘world organization’.
The core institutions at this level are the United Nations Security
Council and the various world courts, including the International
Criminal Court, all of which must be strengthened and also detached
from the many other functional organizations of the current United
Nations. This strengthened world organization would focus on two
tasks, and two tasks alone: securing peace and promoting and imple-
menting human rights. All other political issues, Habermas continues
to think, will take place at the transnational level, in a system of
fair negotiation among the relevant actors and stakeholders, includ-
ing regional regimes such as the European Union. The purpose of
these institutions, which will be functionally distributed according
to problems and functions, will be to create ‘global domestic policy
[Weltinnenpolitik]’, making this structure genuinely transnational
rather than matters of international foreign policy. Habermas fore-
sees that states will ultimately become integrated into the various
transnational networks and regimes that will produce such policies,
and will remain open to the influence and deliberation of publics
from below. Hence, we can see that the transnational level generates
a ‘pluralist’ and multilevel world society, in which governance is dis-
persed across networks which incorporate states, but which take on
independent organizational roles depending on the sort of problem
to be addressed.
The differences between the national, transnational and supra-
national levels make clear that the burdens of legitimation are also
spread throughout the system, through a particular division of labour.
Legitimacy at the national level is democratic and ethical, depend-
ent on the implementation of procedures and the development of a
public political culture. At the transnational level, legitimacy is fun-
damentally a matter of politics and negotiation, so that the complex
agreements and policies can be seen to be open to the influence of all
affected and also to be effective in solving particular problems. But
the supranational level faces the problems of what Habermas calls
‘the classical agenda of international law’, that of promoting peace,
56  f  James Bohman

security and freedom. He thus makes a strong distinction between

law and politics. Habermas insists that the development of interna-
tional law ‘follows the intrinsic logic of an explication and extension
of human rights’ and that ‘the issues the world organization faces
tend to be more of a legal rather than a political kind’ (2006: 143).
Consistent with the view of law and democracy that Habermas pre-
sented in his earlier works, law and politics part ways without estab-
lished democratic practice, rather than being unified in the demands
of popular sovereignty and democratic procedures. Thus, the supra-
national level is concerned with ‘the enforcement of established
law’ and ‘takes precedence over the constructive task of legislation
and policy making’. That human rights are settled issues and form
a basis for legal legitimacy as enforcement means that the demands
of legitimacy at this level are lower than at the transnational one,
where negotiations issue in decisions which ‘demand a higher degree
of legitimation and hence more effectively institutionalized forms of
citizen participation’ (Habermas 2006: 140). Habermas thinks that
this difference in the demands of legitimacy means that the jury
is still out on international politics. However, given their ‘modest
agenda’, he considers it more likely that supranational institutions
will be able to accomplish their juridical task and implement human
rights as ‘negative duties associated with a universalistic morality of
justice’ (ibid.: 143). This legitimacy will be enhanced by the cosmo-
politan solidarity that emerges with the global public’s reactions to
grave violations of human rights.
Despite this appeal to specific functions at the transnational and
supranational levels, both of which lessen the demands of legitimacy
as compared to nation-states, Habermas now argues that ‘the viabil-
ity of any form of democracy, including the democratic state, depends
on the success of the (Kantian) project’ of a political constitution of
a world society (ibid.: 118). Thus, the further viability of democracy
‘depends on the project of constitutionalization — that is, the pro-
ject of extending “the pacifying function of law” to the global level,
even as it remains conceptually intertwined with the function of a
legal condition that citizens see as legitimately promoting freedom’
(ibid.: 121). This may seem a bold claim for the power of cosmopoli-
tan democracy, but Habermas’ argument for it is that constitutionali-
zation beyond the state is the only feasible means to enhance, rather
than detract from, democratic forms of governance. Thus, no matter
how horizontally organized, the network of global governance cannot
in principle fulfil this function of legitimation, and requires consti-
tutional supranational institutions that back human rights claims in
 Democratizing International Law  F  57

order to secure the structural basis for democratic legitimacy. This is

not to say that the form of the constitution would be the same as in
the case of national government, but its function of securing freedom
must be the same. The supranational level of governance that fulfils
this function is to do so for human rights, even if it lacks the basis for
democratic self-legislation.
This shift in Habermas’ position raises a basic question: What sort
of democracy is this kind of constitution supposed to establish? As
we saw in Habermas’ rejection of stronger versions of cosmopolitan
democracy, it is just this conception of democracy that guided his
account of jurisgenerative democracy within states in Between Facts
and Norms (1996). For this reason Habermas argued against any notion
of democracy beyond the state or regional organizations of states in
The Postnational Constellation (2001), still holding out the hope that
the European Union could give itself a constitution that would make
for a European demos and a European public. Habermas has now once
again modified his position, arguing that the constitutional order that
needs to be created beyond the state would not be one of a republican
self-legislating demos constituting power, but one related to a differ-
ent ‘liberal’ republican tradition, in which the constitution does not
so much constitute authority as constrain power by directing it into
legal channels. ‘By rejecting the identity of the rulers and the ruled,
a constitution of this type ensures the conceptual independence of
three elements, namely, the constitution, the powers of the state and
citizenship’ (Habermas 2008: 316). Habermas thus disaggregates
the functions of the state, allowing for formal international organiza-
tions that lack state characteristics and do not legitimate their power
by appealing to the will of citizens. This account fits international
law very well, since its legitimacy and power to constrain cannot be
traced back to any constitutive role of the demos, although it in no
way rules out the possibility that its legitimacy will also play a role
in channels of legitimation in democratic states. Habermas is thus far
from the view that the General Assembly could somehow be organ-
ized so as to constitute a self-legislating global demos. If the success of
this new emerging constitutionalization is to legitimate cosmopolitan
democracy through its capacity to promote freedom, it can do so only
if extant normative conceptions of democracy are no longer univocal
across the various levels of world society. Alternative conceptions of
democracy must therefore be sought. In other words, the issue is not
merely whether some weaker conception of democracy is appropri-
ate, but whether democratic legitimacy is present at all in any form
above the nation-state.
58  f  James Bohman

If this version of a multilevel, politically organized world society

is to be successful institutionally, Habermas must secure legitimacy
across a variety of different levels and institutions. Given that he con-
siders a self-legislating demos to be unavailable above the national
level, Habermas elaborates his response by posing a dilemma: the
source of legitimacy must be either transnational or supranational.
The first horn of the dilemma quickly runs into the weakness of
global domestic politics. Rather than supranational institutions, legal
pluralists such as Anne-Marie Slaughter see the desegregation of
state sovereignty as presenting the opportunity to replace old verti-
cal power-based dependencies with horizontal interactions and func-
tional interconnections in policy networks, which de facto already
make many binding decisions (Slaughter 2004). The problem is that
these networks are not all that new, since participants in such mul-
tilateral global regulatory processes are delegates of the executive
branch. Habermas therefore does not adopt this solution, since it
leaves the question of the legitimacy of these processes unanswered.
More formal transnational organizations are similarly limited, lacking
the authority to amend or formulate new legal norms. On the other
hand, supranational organizations are organized around universal
negative duties related to human rights and their enforcement, which
provide the justificatory bases of their decisions. While the United
Nations has recently tended to extend its conception of security to
include global redistribution, such an agenda cannot be fulfilled by an
organization that emphasizes sovereign equality and consensus, prin-
ciples that are ill-suited to the constructive tasks of global politics. In
fact, an attempt to use supranational institutions in this way would
overburden and potentially delegitimate them as they exercise their
authority. Embracing neither horn of the dilemma, global neoliberal-
ism emerges in this deficit of legitimation, leaving the management of
global markets to managers and executives, while issues of political
legitimacy and redistributions are left entirely to states.
Does reconstructing this argument about a legitimation deficit as
a dilemma help in identifying a possible way to escape the problem?
Democracy is needed to expand the notion of security underlying
supranational institutions, on the one hand, and to underwrite redis-
tributive features of global domestic policy, on the other. But the
form of democracy that would make this possible is not available at
either level. So, is there a way out? As Habermas sees it, the only
solution available under conditions that will hold for the foreseeable
future is to institute a division of institutional labour that will pro-
duce the necessary forms of legitimacy across the institutional system
 Democratizing International Law  F  59

as a whole, without relying on any one form of legitimacy. But how

does this solve the problem? It does so by not simply having each
level produce its own form of legitimacy; rather, legitimacy at each
level is mutually reinforcing. However, the supranational level cannot
be democratically legitimate ‘if it were completely severed from the
channels of democratic legitimation’ (Habermas 2006: 140).
Consider the Kantian claim that the goals of the international sys-
tem and of republican states are mutually reinforcing, such that law is
the solution to the problem of peace, since constitutionalization moves
the state away from the self-defeating attempt to secure non-domina-
tion at home by pursuing domination abroad. Such mutually enhanc-
ing relationships can be found in the emergence of the International
Criminal Court and the diffuse global public sphere, to which the
court ‘lends an authoritative voice’ when stirred by political crimes
and unjust regimes (ibid.: 142). At a more structural level, publics of
citizens and their elected representatives provide a source of legitima-
tion and delegitimation through forms of accountability that are only
available within democratic institutions, while world domestic politics
provides the institutional basis for advancing global concerns, such as
the negotiation of effective and binding measures to ameliorate cli-
mate change or other environmental problems that cross borders.
At the same time, however, Habermas is concerned that the forms
of legitimacy at the various levels will be overextended when human
rights institutions are used to promote the alleviation of poverty as
a human right. While recognizing that the expansion of security
beyond its current boundaries is inevitable, Habermas thinks that
such an achievement should be a matter not of legal enforcement, but
of creating a coordinated agreement at the transnational level. While
many critics demand a more direct application of human rights law
to issues of severe poverty and deprivation, Habermas thinks that
the instrument of law is too blunt to accomplish the required legiti-
macy. In this case, the two levels work against each other, in that legal
coercion works against an effective and negotiated political solution.
Whatever the outcome of some future judicial decision about des-
titution as a human rights violation, how a global regime dedicated
to alleviating poverty would be constructed remains a political and
not a judicial matter. We cannot expect an ‘uninterrupted chain of
legitimation’ that runs from nation-states to the world organization.
Not only do gaps remain, but the form of legitimation is also not dis-
continuous across levels.
With this multilevel account, Habermas moves away from his ini-
tial understanding of constitutionalizing the cosmopolitan condition.
60  f  James Bohman

The role of the constitution of a pluralist world society is not to make

individuals the authors and subjects of law, where all legitimate power
comes from the will of the people. Rather, Habermas holds that the
constitution of the pluralist world society is ‘liberal’, in that its goal is
to set limits on power in creating a rule of law ‘that can normatively
shape existing power relations, regardless of their democratic origins,
and direct the exercise of political power into legal channels’ (2006:
149). But, contrary to Habermas, such a constitution cannot simply
be liberal, but must at the same time be deeply republican. For in
emphasizing mutual limitation at the level of the institutional divi-
sion of labour, it relies heavily on the idea of representation across
levels: besides being represented in a democratic state, one is also the
principal within a transnational negotiation system and an individual
subject of cosmopolitan law. Such multilevel representation has its
own problems of legitimation. The problem is not merely the distant
and discontinuous chains of legitimation. The fundamental problem
of political legitimacy is that, however expansive it is at the supra-
national level, it leaves large numbers of people effectively unrepre-
sented, unfree and without political status. It is this violation of the
rule of law that makes relevant at all levels the demand of the repub-
lican core of democracy, namely, that the political order ensure the
right to rights, as citizens, as members of publics and as individuals.

Republicanism and Tranational Democracy

As Habermas moves to a realistic, but still normatively demand-
ing, role for democracy, he returns once again to Kant. Even as he
criticizes Kant’s view of popular sovereignty as overly influenced by
Rousseau, Habermas considers Kant a touchstone precisely because
he is able to combine the idea of a cosmopolitan constitution with
republicanism. It is republicanism that permits Habermas to solve
the problem of authority that plagues the maximalist positions that
he has taken in the past. Instead of being the subjects of the law, Kant
allows us to make ‘the conceptual connection between the role of law
in promoting peace and the role of a legal condition that citizens can
accept as legitimate in promoting freedom’ (ibid.: 121). But the free-
dom thus promoted and the cosmopolitan constitution that promotes
it are better conceived of as republican than as liberal, if we are to
ensure that these institutions do not simply impose duties and obliga-
tions. Under these conditions, the communicative freedom to initiate
deliberation becomes the communicative power to place an item on
an institution’s agenda. It is the constructive aspect of communicative
 Democratizing International Law  F  61

freedom that enables us to modify and reinterpret our obligations,

the acceptance of which ‘creates a fact of communicatively generated
and freely accepted obligations’ (Habermas 1996: 147).
In the republican constitution, freedom as non-domination is
manifested when an agent possesses sufficient communicative free-
dom and access to communicative power to avoid having his or her
terms set by the other members, and thus potentially, if not actually,
possesses a minimum of normative and political control over his or
her statuses. Indeed, even Philip Pettit’s own republican definition of
‘arbitrary interference’ makes sense only against the normative back-
ground of rights, duties, roles, and institutions which actors mutually
take for granted in their social action, and which make agents cor-
respondingly and differentially powerful with respect to the capacity
to dominate others (1997: 25-27). Pettit clearly overreaches — in a
way that Habermas does not — when he claims that the emergence
of constitutional government ‘brings domination to an end’ (ibid.:
56-59). This claim not only lacks historical plausibility, but it also
makes it very difficult to expand republican non- domination to other
forms of injustice and other great harms that people suffer in a vari-
ety of settings, some of which are emerging only now. As a critical
theory of the present, republicanism ought to endorse the priority
of injustice, in order to expand and enrich its moral and political
vocabulary so as to articulate what Marx calls ‘the wishes and strug-
gles of the age’ (2000: 45), now understood as struggles against forms
of domination that are increasingly transnational in character.
While such a republican account of current injustice captures
important features of Habermas’ understanding of a transnational
order, this is not the direction in which he takes his argument. He
argues for a proceduralist conception of popular sovereignty ‘as com-
patible with the corresponding chains of legitimation that unfold in
each of the various member states’, legitimation that includes the
international order (Habermas 2006: 123). He does not consider this
to suggest the extension of the constitutional process to the global
level, even if it is broadly republican in the sense that these chains are
the source of legitimacy. However, beyond the state level, he clearly
restricts constitutional scope in a minimalist manner: ‘constitutions
of the liberal type recommend themselves for political communi-
ties beyond states or continental regimes such as the EU’ (Habermas
2006: 139). This certainly solves the problem of authority for the
maximalist conception through the division of authority by levels,
and even allows for pluralized processes of legitimation within states
to exercise influence on higher levels, albeit indirectly. Habermas
62  f  James Bohman

addresses these difficulties by limiting trans- and supranational polit-

ical authority to very specific tasks, most prominently the enforce-
ment of human rights. Further, global and regional public spheres can
also exercise influence and shape discourses.
However, a multilevel system organized around liberal constitu-
tionalism without a clear republican dimension of legitimacy is insuf-
ficient. While Habermas argues that such a constitution is all that we
can expect from a ‘politically organized world society’, minimalism
about this important feature of a cosmopolitan order may be too high
a price to pay, particularly since, from a republican perspective, a
system of fair negotiation is no replacement for democratic decision-
making. Such an approach to cosmopolitan order would involve a
conception of democracy that is simply too minimalist and norma-
tively thin, especially since it eliminates the important republican
features of self-rule that ought to inform international law and its
role in promoting democracy and human rights. As important as it
is, a world society is not politically constituted without citizens being
both the authors and the subjects of the laws.
This criticism suggests that the most plausible way to address this
deficit of legitimacy is to recover the missing republican dimension
of Habermas’ conception of a ‘politically organized world society’.
While he previously sought a theory of global democracy that rec-
onciled liberalism and democracy, he is now sceptical about this —
the demand for civic solidarity, he now argues, ‘cannot be extended
at will across borders’ (ibid.: 139). For this reason, he recommends
liberal constitutions for political communities beyond states or
continental regimes such as the EU. At the same time, prominent
republicans such as Pettit also suggest something like Rawls’ ‘law of
peoples’ as the appropriate form for transnational republicanism, to
the extent that non-domination can become a public good only in
such associations. Pettit and other republicans thus neglect the strong
connection between poverty and domination — the direct effects
of such inequalities on the poor lead to perverse political and struc-
tural consequences that undermine social freedom. Pettit agrees that
‘ensuring your social freedom will require eliminating those material
and related disadvantages that expose you to control by others’ (1997:
77). But he nonetheless does not draw the conclusion that destitution
makes many agents in a politically constituted world society system-
atically vulnerable to domination, since it also results in transnational
domination in the world economy that severely limits the worth
of their liberty. These disadvantages produce structural domina-
tion, rather than the bilateral domination of one agent’s control over
 Democratizing International Law  F  63

another. According to Andrew Hurrell (2001), inequalities among

states give rise to huge differences in political influence and bargain-
ing power between the rich and the poor and between rich and poor
states. This inegalitarian basic structure results in global poverty,
whose institutions are often so shaped by inequalities of power and
resources as to lack even minimal conditions of freedom and equality.
Such judgements may seem premature, especially given the emer-
gence of transnational publics and public spheres, on the basis of
which communicative freedom could be transformed into commu-
nicative power. However, much of the current revival of republican-
ism no longer takes the state as the basic horizon for citizenship and
rights. Instead, an emerging transnational form of republicanism is
not concerned so much with the sovereign state as with the sover-
eignty of the people, which is particularly significant in the light of
new possibilities for domination. An alternative understanding of the
republican possibilities of the present that provides the basis for non-
domination across borders may be found in Habermas’ own writings.
For his distinction between communicative freedom and communi-
cative power is helpful in understanding the broader possibilities of
democracy and democratization (Bohman 2010). Considered in this
regard, democratization has two main dimensions: first, it requires
institutions, publics and associations in which communicative free-
dom is realized; and, second, that this communicative freedom be
exercised in empowered institutions that link such freedom to the
exercise of normatively generated communicative power. Such a role
for democratization cannot be confined to one level or another if a
politically organized world society is to have the republican goal of
non-domination, which Habermas sees as the basis for ‘fully dis-
persed sovereignty’ (2006: 124). Fully dispersed sovereignty can be
maintained and serve a democratic role only if the politically con-
stituted world society is polyarchical rather than hierarchical. At all
levels, a democratic minimum is needed, a minimum that serves to
designate just those necessary conditions for non-domination that
enable ongoing democratization, in which citizens continue to be able
to form and change the terms of their common life together.

Conclusion
This argument for a missing republican dimension in Habermas’
transnational architecture thus appeals to his own consistent under-
standing of the democratizing role of the public sphere, which he sees
as extending beyond the state. Even in the liberal constitutions that
64  f  James Bohman

he recommends for the transnational polity, political power depends

on normative reasons, which are for him the means for ‘translating
communicative influence into political power’ (Habermas 1996:
484). And even if there is a role for a liberal constitution in achiev-
ing fair negotiation and bargaining, a constitution must nonetheless
involve the normative expectation that its rational outcomes depend
on ‘the interplay between institutionally structured political will
formation and spontaneous, unsubverted circuits of communication
in the public sphere’ (ibid.: 485). This necessary republican role of
publics as the sources of popular sovereignty is worth preserving,
particularly since it affords a stronger emphasis on non-domination
than Pettit’s claim that political institutions, and thus officials, must
‘track the opinions and interests’ of citizens as a check on arbitrary
interference (1997: 65). Even if communicative power originates in
spontaneously autonomous public spheres, it does not become the
basis for democratization without the capacity to inform institutional
democratic decision-making at all levels of the multilevel system of
cosmopolitan democracy. We need not abandon this democratic aspi-
ration. And, as I hope to have shown, without republicanism, lib-
eral constitutionalism cannot provide a sufficiently rich normative
basis for the defensible, maximalist and cosmopolitan position that
Habermas has long sought.

References
Bohman, James. 2005. 'Is Democracy a Means to Global Justice? Human
Rights and the Democratic Minimum', Ethics and International
Affairs 19(1): 101–16.
———. 2010. 'Democratizing the Global Order: From Communicative
Freedom to Communicative Power', Review of International Studies
36(2): 431–47.
Buchanan, Allen. 2004. Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination,
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
———. 1997. 'Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of 200 Years
Hindsight', in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds),
Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 113–54.
———. 2001. The Postnational Constellation, trans. Max Pensky, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass.
 Democratizing International Law  F  65

———. 2006. The Divided West, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press,
Cambridge.
———. 2008. 'A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?',
in Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans.
Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 312–52.
Held, David. 1995. Democracy and the Global Order, Stanford University
Press, Stanford.
———. 2004. The Global Covenant, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Held, David and Anthony McGrew. 2002. Globalization/Antiglobalization,
Polity Press, Cambridge.
Hurrell, Andrew. 2001. 'Global Justice and International Institutions',
Metaphilosophy 32(1/2): 34–57.
Kant, Immanuel. 1971. Political Writings, ed. Hans S. Reiss, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Marx, Karl. 2000. Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Schumpeter, Joseph. 1947. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper,
New York.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom, Knopf Doubleday, New
York.
Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2004. A New World Order, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
3
Feminist Solidarity in India
Communitarian Challenges and
Postnational Prospects*
Kanchana Mahadevan

1 Women — except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences — do

not use “we”....
de Beauvoir (2010: 8)

Justice conceived deontologically requires solidarity as its reverse side.

Habermas (1989–90: 47)

L uce Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference assumes that women’s

nurturing activities in their homes and communities make them
peace-loving. Yet women’s active participation in extreme right
organizations contradicts this assumption, reflecting de Beauvoir’s
observation, made almost sixty years ago, that their loyalty to their
own community splinters their solidarity with each other. Indeed,
women’s political violence has become particularly visible in recent
years with the rise of identity politics in defence of community.
Habermas rightly claims that such politics have been triggered espe-
cially by globalization processes, which create expanding networks
of contacts that are isolated from each other in the stratified, rather
than egalitarian, contexts of what he terms ‘global villages’ (1998:
121). Hence, notions of community and nation akin to kinship offer
the prospect of filling the lacuna of belonging. While much of the

*  Many thanks to Tom Bailey, Aakash Singh Rathore, Markar

Melkonian, and Harshala Patil for their suggestions and help. I also ben-
efited from the feedback of participants at the ‘Global Perspectives on
Habermas’ work-shop held at the Centre for Globalisation Studies at the
University of Groningen in April 2011. The limitations of this chapter, of
course, remain entirely mine.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-5
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  67

rhetoric of extremist women’s groups resembles that of feminist ones,

the latter’s postnational sensibility distinguishes them as feminists.
Indeed, in its affinities and ruptures with Habermas, the feminist
conception of the postnational provides a foil against identity politics,
rather than Habermas’ statist and Eurocentric version.
In this context, this chapter begins by mapping non-feminist col-
lectivities of women who defend communal identities, often in a
violent way, with particular reference to the Indian political right.
Turning to Irigaray’s account of the paradox of women’s centrality
and yet invisibility in the community, it argues that her version of
women’s bonding in fact encourages such violence. The chapter then
considers Habermas’ more pluralist account of the relation between
individuation and socialization through the coevality between jus-
tice and solidarity. It argues that his pluralist intent is captured more
adequately by Indian feminist collectivities in their practice of the
postnational than by Habermas himself.1

Women’s Violence in the Global Village

According to Urvashi Butalia, ‘[i]t is now widely accepted that while
women seldom create or initiate conflict, they — along with children
and the aged — are often its chief victims and sufferers’ (2008: 257).
It is in this spirit that Irigaray, who critiques patriarchy as inherently
violent, suggests the recovery of female ancestry as bonding between
women, namely, as mothers and daughters (1994: 91–113). Yet such
dissociation of women and conflict ignores a phenomenon that has
become quite visible in the past two decades — that is, women’s
initiation of violence. Instances ranging from Abu Ghraib to the
2002 riots in Gujarat, India, reveal that women are not always vic-
tims of violence, but can also be its active initiators. Indeed, the com-
munity’s grip over the individual as an assertion of pride over the
perceived shame of losing ‘manhood’ is a catalyst for such engage-
ment by women (cf. Nussbaum 2007).
As Habermas observes, xenophobia is a response to the weakening
of the nation-state with globalization (1999: 51–52). To quote,

The trends summed up in the word ‘globalization’ are not only jeop-
ardizing, internally, the comparatively homogeneous make-up of

1 
The challenge posed by women’s violence, understood as a response
to globalization, is explored from the perspectives of Kantian cosmopoli-
tanism and Arendt’s notion of power in Mahadevan 2013.
68  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

national populations . . . by prompting immigration and cultural strat-

ification; even more tellingly, a state that is increasingly entangled in
the independencies between the global economy and global society
is seeing its autonomy, capacity for action and democratic substance
diminish (Habermas 1999: 48).

Globalization, despite its contentiousness, introduces economic,

political, cultural, and environmental relations that have both inten-
sified existing networks and connected far-flung regions ‘in such a
way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles
away and vice versa’ (Anthony Giddens, in Steger 2003: 10–11).
However, as Habermas observes, although information networks
have expanded, they have also fragmented interaction (1998: 121).
‘The publics produced by the internet remain closed off to one
another like global villages’ (ibid.).2 Thus, rather than distribute jobs
and goods evenly, global finance has led to pockets of privilege in a
burgeoning lack of material necessities. Moreover, communities and
cultures that have existed for several centuries have been disman-
tled in the course of creating well-being for a few. This in turn has
resulted in the loss of cultural belonging, agency and power. The con-
sequent religious, ethnic and nationalist loyalties are not governed by
the same motivations, something that has even been used to justify
wars against them. Western governments often express worry over
the supposed illiberal non-Western societies and governments, thus
justifying even wars against them. 3 Extremist factions in Asia and
Africa react to this as the corruptible effect of Western culture and
promote religious chauvinism as an alternative to imperialism.
In the context of rising communitarian identities, feminists must
address the challenge of women being agents of violence. This is espe-
cially so with respect to women from hegemonic groups who act col-
lectively against women from vulnerable social groups or nation-states.
(see also Panicker 2002; Rommelspacher 2005; Sarkar and Butalia
1995). Women’s initiation of violence is not entirely novel — for
instance, during the Nazi period women actively participated in ethnic
cleansing to create a society of race supremacy (Rommelspacher 2005:

2 
This is a paradoxical reversal of Marshall McLuhan’s view that mass
communications have made the world a single ‘global village’.
3 
Since World War II, the United States has led attacks only against
weaker, undemocratic countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  69

54–56).4 However, it is particularly since the 1980s that many parts of

the world have seen women’s organized participation in extreme right
groups.5 In tune with this global trend, Indian women’s roles in Hindu
right-wing movements since the 1980s have given them a distinct
public visibility (Sarkar and Butalia 1995).6 For instance, during the
Gujarat riots in March 2002, women from the Hindu right actively
participated in the violence against Muslim women.7
However, besides organized violence, these groups also address
the vacuum of cultural identity caused by globalization. The Dnyana
Prabodhini (DP), for instance, combines the privileged woman’s need
for cultural rootedness with the underprivileged woman’s monetary
needs (Dyahadroy 2009). Its manifesto urges women to follow a
reformed, ‘modern’ regimen of rituals to acquire social responsibil-
ity in a globalized era (ibid.: 71). Yet these women also work for the
improvement of their rural underprivileged counterparts, through
healthcare and small savings schemes. Another example is the maga-
zine Jagriti, which does not refer to the conventional aspects of ‘femi-
ninity’ common in women’s magazines, such as cookery or romance,
but emphasizes patriotism (Sarkar 1995: 207). Besides providing
access to day care centres and supplementary income generation,
these organizations train women in physical arts, revisionist ver-
sions of Indian history, religious ritual, and public speaking (Setalvad
1995: 236). They even celebrate Women’s Day to mark women’s
uniqueness. For instance, on 8 March 2011, the Shiv Sena Party paid

4 
As is well-known, in The Republic Plato defended women’s participa-
tion in the military (1961). See also Blythe 2001 for the medieval con-
text of women in the military.
5 
I am by no means suggesting that this phenomenon is confined to
militant Hinduism. See Durham and Power 2010 for the transnational
context, and Butler 2006 for the Christian right in the US.
6 
The Rashtra Sevika Samiti was the only extremist women’s organiza-
tion formed in 1936 in India, as the sister organization of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). But it has not indulged in public display like
the other women’s wings of the Hindu right have since the 1980s (Sarkar
1995: 193; see Sarkar 1995 and Setalvad 1995 for a discussion of these
issues). The women’s wings of other Hindu right organizations include
Mahila Aghadi (Shiv Sena), the Durga Vahini (Vishwa Hindu Parishad)
and Mahila Morcha (Basu 1995: 161; see also Setalvad 1995).
7 
On the Gujarat riots, see Panicker 2002 and Varadarajan 2002. On
women’s violence during the riots in December 1992 and January 1993,
see Sarkar 1995.
70  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

tributes to the nurturing capacity of women in several of their centres

(shakhas)8 At their centre (shakha) in the Koli Vada area in Mumbai,
a gathering of about 2,000 women from neighbouring slums attended
the programme, conducted by men in the Marathi language. Women
celebrities from the Marathi film industry were honoured for their
achievements against a background of song and dance. A brief his-
tory of the rise of the women’s movement in the West was narrated,
with particular reference to the struggle for voting rights in the 1920s.
However, there was no reference to similar struggles in the Indian
context or to the women’s movement in India. The Women’s Day pro-
gramme thus came across as a celebration, rather than as an ongoing
struggle for a democratic relation between the sexes. Such an engage-
ment with the social dimension of women’s lives provides an imagined
sense of empowerment, of going beyond traditional roles in the fam-
ily (Rommelspacher 2005: 57), but these responsibilities in the pub-
lic sphere only serve to buttress women’s domestic image (Banerjee
1995: 223; see also Basu 1995; Rommelspacher 2005; Sarkar 1995;
Setalvad 1995).
At this stage, it is instructive to turn to Irigaray’s account of the
relation between individual and community to comprehend women’s
roles in patriarchal communities — especially in contexts such as the
Indian one. 9 Contrary to Gupta, Irigaray does not simply articulate a
privileged European perspective of embodied limitless pleasure (jou-
issance), which cannot comprehend the oppressed body in the Indian
context (see also Gupta 1995, 1996). She discusses the patriarchal
community with reference to Hegel, who delineated a domestic role
for women in the household for the sake of the community (Irigaray
1985a: 214–26). For Hegel, it is when male and female bodies per-
form their naturally given roles as producers and reproducers that
male individuals can transcend the family and civil society to become
political (Chanter 1995: 86). On his view, males offer their bodies
in war for the preservation of the community, while females offer
theirs through the family for its birth, as well as its symbolic memory
in death (as burial rites for safe passage). Irigaray interprets Hegel
as a philosopher who has made a ‘natural’ distinction between men

8 
This report is based on a personal visit to this centre (shakha) on 8
March 2011. The programme was conducted in the premises of a munici-
pal school.
9 
SeeMahadevan 2013: 150–51 for a discussion referring to Irigaray’s
critique of rationality.
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  71

and women in terms of ‘inner and outer, vital and bloodless, see-
ing and non-seeing’ (Chanter: 83). He associates vitality and vision
with individuality as the basis of the conscious ethical principle. The
feminine is unconsciously so, since women have a natural inclina-
tion — without reflection — to take responsibility for their families.
Consequently, Hegel argues that the natural be subsumed under the
reflective, or the family under the state.
Hegel’s argument, typical of patriarchal philosophy, leads to ‘the
eternal irony of the community’, where women are central to the very
birth of the community and yet remain outsiders (Irigaray 1985a:
225–26). Irigaray argues that they reproduce individual citizens
who refuse relationships to safeguard atomic communities (Chanter
1995: 133–46). Habermas himself views the family as the site within
which communicative action or action oriented to understanding,
as opposed to goals, is transmitted (1989: 387). The family offers
individuals to the system world of the state and economy, which is
governed by a calculative rationality based on money and power. He
points to a polarization in the family structure where, despite its
communicative potential, it gets enmeshed in the functional impera-
tives of the state and economy. The latter are external impositions on
the interactive and egalitarian self that emerges within the communi-
cative structures of the family. Thus, in Habermas’ diagnosis the self
as a separate ego emerges through the colonization of the lifeworld,
whose institutions include the family, by the bureaucratic apparatus
of the system world. The reproductive role of women in the family
is central to the kind of ego development that has been articulated
by Irigaray, as much as it is to Hegel’s and Habermas’ accounts.10 To
return to women’s commitment to fascist organizations, their visibil-
ity in the public sphere becomes central to their role as reproducers
of group identity, but is also a source of their erasure.11
Yet in her search for women’s collectivity, Irigaray tends to natural-
ize the relationships among women as sharing an ancient unity with
nature that is fragmented by patriarchal men (1985b: 164). Irigaray
consequently proposes that feminists recover their primordial bond,
founded on the common injury of their being denied a polyvalent

10 
However, like Hegel, Habermas too overlooks the gendered hierar-
chy within the family. See Fraser 1995 and Mahadevan 2001 for a cri-
tique of Habermas’ gender-neutral account of the family.
11 
See also Anthias and Davies 1994 for a lucid account of the repro-
ductive function of women.
72  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

corporeality. Indeed, as her critics have argued with reference to her

early position, there is a tendency to essentialize women by assum-
ing that they all share the same female embodiment. Irigaray aims
both to recover such a naturally given women’s unity and to expand
it to include men. However, women’s participation in fundamentalist
organizations belies her belief in their homogeneity. Rather, they are
divided along the matrices of class, caste and race.12 Despite being
sedimented with centuries of thought and practice, patriarchy is not
as static and ahistorical as Irigaray implies. Its historicity makes it
flexible and adaptive, which is precisely why the feminist movement
can address it through critique and change.
Given the problem of women’s militancy, one cannot assume with
Irigaray that women automatically become free by establishing a
‘relationship with’ their ‘own gender’ (Irigaray 1994: 20; Mahadevan
2013: 154–55). Replacing the male genealogy of mother-son relations
with mother-daughter relations (ibid.: 9–14, 91–112) will not address
the paradox of women’s voluntary and involuntary engagement with
a defence of their community.13 Further, as bell hooks argues, soli-
darity between women cannot be founded on their homogeneous
experience of injury (1992: 392–93).14 Their active participation in
autocratic organizations and subsequent alienation of other women
show that all women do not have uniform experiences of oppression.
Besides, victimization tends to encourage passivity, while women’s
solidarity requires active agency (ibid.: 392).
Irigaray’s account of women’s victimization tends to be at odds
with her feminist goal of demystifying stereotypes of women. Such
original unity is also inconsistent with her own view that there are
many feminist struggles and not just one (1985b: 164; cf. Mahadevan
2013: 154–55). That women do not share a primeval accord can
be seen in their diverse forms of political participation — from
Gandhianism and anti-colonial left struggles to postcolonial work-
ing- class politics and environmental politics (Sarkar 1995: 183; see

12 
As de Beauvoir remarks, women’s lives are dispersed among those
of men in being tied to domestic responsibilities (2010: 8). Hence, she
upholds that ‘[i]f they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity
with men of that class, not with proletarian women’ (1972: 19). A less­
species-genus translation reads, ‘[a]s bourgeois women, they are in soli-
darity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians’ (2010: 9).
13 
Women’s leadership is not the norm, as Banerjee 1995: 225 and
Sarkar 1995: 211 point out.
14 
Cf.Mahadevan 2013: 154–55 for an analogous discussion.
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  73

also hooks 1992: 402; Mahadevan 2013: 155). Such an availability

of options also shows that women who enter right-wing politics do
so out of choice (ibid.).15 This choice is in turn determined by their
sense of agency and public acceptability.

Identity and Solidarity

As has been argued above, women’s solidarity cannot merely affirm
the communal bonds that they already possess, as this overlooks the
relations of dominance and subordination between communities that
fuel violence.16 If the bonds between women are to be empowering,
they must treat solidarity as a process to be achieved rather than as
an already existing state. This in turn requires pluralism and com-
munication. Hence, ‘[w]omen do not need to eradicate difference to
feel solidarity’ (hooks 1992: 404). This is precisely why Habermas’
postconventional model is more gender-sensitive than Irigaray’s
naturalistic one. He comprehends individuation as another aspect
of socialization processes (Habermas 1989–90: 46).17 According to
this view, individual identity is acquired and shaped through speech,
and it is therefore the community’s capacity for speech, rather than
religion or race, that becomes central to the formation of individual
identity. For Habermas, speech occurs against the background of the
lifeworld interactions that are reciprocally related to communicating
individuals (1998: 251). The lifeworld is not organized like the sys-
tem world of money and power, nor is it a determinate organization
or association of pre-formed individuals, such as Locke’s associations
in the state of nature. It is rather an indeterminate reservoir of cul-
tural and social practices that nurtures individuals through cultural
reproduction, social integration and socialization; the practices of the
lifeworld are oriented towards mutual understanding among indi-
viduals through communicative media such as language (ibid.: 252).
Habermas believes that one needs to comprehend identity and
socialization through a ‘double aspect’ (1989–90: 46), whereby the

15 
As Rommelspacher observes, one cannot valorize a relational
woman in the contrast between relationality and individualism (2005).
The relational woman is someone enmeshed in a web of interactions in
relation to men, such as a wife and daughter.
16 
See Mahadevan 2013: 154–59 for a discussion of the relation
between solidarity and Arendt’s notion of power.
17 
He develops this argument through George Herbert Mead (see
Habermas 1992).
74  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

greater the individuation, the greater the socialization. Individual

subjects are caught up in dense and subtle networks of interactions
and dependencies, which make their identities vulnerable. ‘Thus, the
person forms an inner centre only to the extent to which she simul-
taneously externalizes herself in communicatively produced inter-
personal relationships’ (ibid.). As Habermas puts it, ‘living creatures’
are themselves vulnerable because they cannot assert their identities
nor preserve their integrities without also reciprocally recognizing
others with whom their lives are bound up. This notion of individual
identity as based on difference and as susceptible can be extended in
the context of group identity. Like the individual, any given group
acquires its identity in interactive and interdependent contexts.
Hence, instead of violating its others, the group should interact and
cooperate with them to evolve its own, tenuous identity. Indeed,
there is mutual dependence between diverse groups that are not iso-
lated from each other. For Habermas, solidarity loses significance if
it is restricted to a collectivity that is ‘ethnocentrically isolated from
other groups’ (ibid.: 47). Such insulation is where a collectivity obeys
a leader as a follower, rather than interacting with others as fellow
travellers. Habermas observes that traditional and pre-modern forms
of group cohesion depended on such leadership and on essentialist
definitions of the group to unite the people. He cites the instance of
Nazi Germany, where ‘All for one and one for all’ became a motto.
The right-wing movements in India and their women’s organiza-
tions are also instances of such obedience. Against such uniform-
ity, Habermas’ solidarity is a ‘postconventional’ perspective where
members of the collectivity discuss its conventions so as to change
them. This is possible only when the ‘idealizing presuppositions’ of
language are taken into consideration (Habermas 1989–90: 47–48).
These presuppositions include the conditions of equal freedom and
expectation of reciprocal interaction of those affected to participate
in dialogue. Thus, according to Habermas, ‘equal treatment, solidarity
and general welfare’ have to be held together in a dialogue situation.
A postconventional solidarity of ‘discursive will-formation’ must
therefore turn to other groups in a bid to both criticize and transcend
itself. The boundaries of the family, tribe or nation can only be fis-
sured by language or speech (ibid.: 48). In the capacity for speech,
the arguments given by participants go beyond the specific lifeworlds
to which they belong, in that they refer to an ideal communication
community of which they are members (ibid.). Discourses are a
reflected form of actions geared towards understanding. They turn to
precisely linguistic forms of mediation to resolve the vulnerability of
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  75

the identity of their participants, yet in doing so, they take recourse
to that very same language that makes their participants vulnerable
(ibid.). ‘The pragmatic features of discourse make possible a will for-
mation whereby the interests of each unit, be it an individual or a
group, can be taken into account without destroying the social bonds
that link each individual with all others’ (ibid.). Every participant in
discourse is an individual or group with her or its own point of view,
who are nevertheless joined to all others in a form of association.
This opens up universality, not as uniformity or commonality, but as
openness to the point of view of the other.
As Habermas argues, the notion of justice is central to bonds of
solidarity that transcend narrow group or nationalist unities. Under
conditions of solidarity, each person takes responsibility for the other
because ‘as consociates all must have an interest in the integrity of their
shared life context in the same way’ (ibid.: 48). Thus, each partner in
conversation, be it the individual or the group, is entitled to equal treat-
ment in terms of having the freedom to initiate and respond within
the framework of dialogue. ‘Justice concerns the equal freedoms of
unique and self-determining individuals’ (ibid.: 47), and it becomes
possible because of its rootedness in solidarity. As each individual or
group raises his or her voice regarding his or her own welfare, she or he
also has to take an interest in the welfare of the others. Hence, without
well-being in solidarity with others there cannot be justice for the indi-
vidual or the group, as the two are interlinked. The mutual process of
recognition within an intersubjective framework is solidarity that ‘con-
cerns the welfare of consociates who are intimately linked in an inter-
subjectively shared form of life — and thus also to the maintenance of
the integrity of this form of life itself’ (Habermas 1989–90: 47).
Justice and solidarity are two aspects of the same process of
intersubjective interaction through discourse or communication.
Discourse ethics construes justice within the earthly framework of
dialogue and does not adhere to pre-modern metaphysical notions of
justice as salvation and the like (ibid.: 49). Justice does not depend
upon the metaphysical worldview of the group in question, nor does it
appeal to a pre-existing organic unity. Against Irigaray, this emerges
in the context of bonds between persons who do not have a shared
ancestry.

Postnational Solidarity
According to Habermas, an individuation based on solidarity with
strangers is best realized in a postnational framework in which each
76  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

person and nation is mutually recognized from the individual, cul-

tural and political perspectives.18 For instance, issues of migrant
labour and multiple cultures cannot be addressed within the
European nation-state, given the force of globalization.19 Besides,
statelessness has become the order of the day for enormous numbers
of people, and hence their identity lies beyond the narrow confines
of the nation-state (Habermas 1996: 507–8). Therefore, Habermas
claims, ‘[t]he welfare-state mass democracies on the Western model
now face the end of a 200-year developmental process that began
with the revolutionary birth of modern nation-states’ (2001a: 61).
He observes that European nation-states are becoming immigrant
societies, contending with globalization processes which have ‘a com-
paratively low threshold of toleration towards exclusion’ (Habermas
2001b: 21). In transcending loyalties to the family and village,
national citizenship was formed through struggles for a legal con-
stitution, ‘political historiography’ and mass communication since
the 19th century in Europe (Habermas 1998: 130; see also 129–32).
The modern nation-state brings together a group of people as citi-
zens on the basis of their allegiance to a national culture. Yet while
providing the criteria for citizenship, it simultaneously exiles those
who do not belong (Butler and Spivak 2010: 4–5). As Habermas puts
it, the nation is a ‘Janus face’: despite including others from within,
it tends to shut them out externally (1998: 131). The state in the
‘nation-state’ is a legal power with internal and external sovereignty
that is both ‘spatial’ over territory and ‘political’ over its members
(ibid.: 107). Modern nation-states function through the system world
forces of money and administration. The state is distinct from civil
society and the economy, 20 and it performs administrative functions

18 
‘Each and every person should receive a three-fold recognition: they
should receive equal protection and equal respect in their integrity as
irreplaceable individuals, as members of ethnic or cultural groups, and
as citizens, that is, as members of the political community’ (Habermas
1996: 496). See also Habermas 1998 and 2001a.
19 
‘[I]mmigration from Eastern Europe and the poverty-stricken
regions of the Third World will heighten the multicultural diversity of
society’ (Habermas 1996: 506).
20 
This is not to deny that the nation-state is a by-product of the econ-
omy. The state too protects economic units through policies, legislations,
contracts, and so forth. There is a complex hiatus between the economy
and the nation-state, especially in a globalized world.
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  77

with a bureaucracy, a penal system and a military to defend sover-

eignty. Thus, ‘such states existed long before there were “nations”
in the modern sense’ (ibid.: 109). 21 It sets in motion a new abstract
mode of social integration of the state between people who do not
share blood bonds with each other. Such social cohesion became
possible with urbanization, the capitalist economy and geographical
mobility of people.
National identity secured unity between people through legal
means as citizens, and this in turn became the basis for legitimizing the
nation-state. Such a transition from royal to popular sovereignty con-
verted the rights of subjects under nobility to civil rights, whereby the
people also became the authors and addressees of the law. Habermas
notes that ‘constitutional patriotism [Verfassungspatriotismus] ‘is a
step in the direction of undercutting the link between substantive
culture and a commonly shared political one, since the political cul-
ture gravitates around the constitution (Habermas 1998: 117). Such
a ‘unity of political culture in the multiplicity of subcultures’ can-
not be confined to the internal boundaries of the nation (ibid.: 116).
Yet globalization weakens national borders for the flow of capital,
borders which nonetheless persist with regard to the employment of
labour. Rather than move across national territories in a free market,
labour is subject to rigid national laws. Globalization has increased
the stateless who are forced to live outside the purview of the law of
the state — as refugees, migrants or diaspora. Those who are mar-
ginalized economically often experience social alienation, which
they frequently resolve through pre-existing group loyalty, leading to
fundamentalism. Hence, justice cannot be confined to the bounda-
ries of the nation-state, but becomes possible through the solidar-
ity of political will formation that transcends national boundaries.
Habermas suggests that in such ‘a “postnational” self-understanding
of the political community’ (ibid.: 119), rather than a homogeneous
people, anonymity and heterogeneity are central.
Yet, as Nivedita Menon has pointed out, the problem with
Habermas is that he assumes that the European Union (henceforth
‘EU’) has achieved just such a postnational consciousness, in con-
trast to the United States (2009: 71–72). Consequently, solidarity
is not an achievement of strangers, but of friends. Thus, the domain

21 
Despite her differences with Habermas, Butler holds a similar view,
stating that ‘[t]he state signifies the legal and institutional structures that
delimit a certain territory’ (Butler and Spivak 2010: 3).
78  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

of postnational action is ‘a social Europe that can throw its weight

onto the cosmopolitan scale’ (Habermas 2001a: 112). Such an
assumption is inegalitarian in the context of the hierarchical rela-
tion between Europe and the continents of Asia, Africa and Latin
America, many of whose poor seek European citizenship to end their
misery. Habermas acknowledges as much — but then, migration is
not only spurred by asylum seekers, but also by those who voluntar-
ily relocate to Europe for professional reasons. In this context, his
dichotomy of a prosperous, secular West and its impoverished, fun-
damentalist other reasserts Western supremacy and patronage (ibid.:
59-60). Thus, Habermas’ Eurocentric bias persists in his discussion
of the non-Western world in the contemporary context. He critiques
Walzer’s defence of the right of a nation to interfere in another’s
internal affairs in the name of its community’s cultural right to self-
assertion (Habermas 1998: 148–50). And he points out that from
the human rights standpoint, cultural self-assertion does not justify
political intervention — the latter is justified only by appealing to
human rights across international lines. Instead, he appeals to inter-
vention to increase democracy, economic sustenance and social tol-
erance within a sovereign state, when necessary through ‘influence
— where possible, in a nonviolent manner’ (Habermas 1998: 150).
The problematic aspect is that Habermas treats Western nations
as having achieved ideal democratic participation in relation to their
non-Western counterparts. This is indeed problematic because, as he
is aware, nations in the West are grappling with problems of social
and economic exclusion, just as their non-Western counterparts are.
Hence, they hardly have the authority to interfere — even through
soft methods — in the internal matters of their less privileged nation-
states. Innumerable instances of Western nation- states influencing
non-Western ones reflect that they do so to safeguard their own inter-
ests, rather than out of altruism or concern for human rights. Further,
Habermas reprehensibly does not rule out the possibility of violent
interference. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are cases of civilian suffering
due to violent political interference in the name of democracy. Women
have paid a particular price in these contexts. In terms of Habermas’
own arguments for solidarity, the change towards a democracy at the
internal level can be brought about only through people’s participation
in political movements for justice, rather than through external inter-
vention. This holds true for both European and non-European parts of
the world.
Moreover, Habermas gives a simplistic and problematic account
of national consciousness outside the Western world. With reference
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  79

to the former colonies of Asia and Africa, he surprisingly notes that

they were ‘“granted” independence by the withdrawal of the colo-
nial powers’ (ibid.: 152)! This claim makes it appear as though the
colonizing European powers are philanthropic advocates of decolo-
nization. It ignores the long and difficult struggles for justice against
imperialism by national liberation movements. Moreover, according
to Habermas, not having state power was a hindrance for these for-
mer colonies. On the contrary, colonial administrations left behind
an excess bureaucracy and obsolete laws, whose reform poses a chal-
lenge to postcolonial populations.22 Interestingly, while defending a
transnational Europe, Habermas begins by citing India and the US as
instances of political unity in diversity (1996: 501). Yet his discussion
focuses primarily on the US and its linguistic unity to show its dif-
ference from Europe, overlooking the fact that India’s multilinguistic
and multicultural polity existed well before the formation of the EU.
Habermas’ account of the postnational is also statist, as several
critics have observed (Canovan 2000; McLaughlin 2004).23 For one,
his postnational constellation is a regional force made up of EU wel-
fare states. He assumes that in tandem with the United Nations and
NGOs, the EU is committed to resolving economic disparity, albeit
in a functionalist way. Thus, Habermas has a ‘benign formulation of
the state’s relationship to civil society’, in which an orderly society
is based on the ‘immutable condition’ of liberal democracy and the
capitalist economy (McLaughlin 2004: 169). He assumes that the
political culture of Europe is one where the state, despite its bureau-
cratic overtones, does heed the voice of its citizens in its concern
about welfare. However, his state paternalism overlooks the schisms
within Europe due to mass migrations. Indeed, it is the state that
decides for the migrants when it mandates that they integrate with
the mainstream, both legally and culturally. In the German context,
while migrant populations do not mind embracing the language and
constitution, they have reservations about identifying with it cul-
turally. They are also increasingly apprehensive of being victims of

22 
The Personal Law regulating civil relations and the criminalization
of homosexuality are two obvious examples in India. Although the latter
was decriminalized in 2009, the Personal Law continues to foreground
the religious community in matters pertaining to marriage, divorce
and so forth. See Habib 1997 for the formation of nation in the Indian
context.
23 
Habermas subscribes to the Westphalian model.
80  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

xenophobia.24 Moreover, Habermas also neglects the fact that states

themselves have followed the dictat of corporate economic inter-
ests, rather than the welfare needs of their citizens in their decision
making.25
Habermas’ account of constitutional patriotism rests on a distinc-
tion between patriotism and nationalism; he traces the former to
pre-political ties of birth and blood. In contrast, constitutional patri-
otism unites multicultural citizens voluntarily through commitment
to democratic principles (Canovan 2000: 415–17; see also Habermas
1996: 500). There are several problems with this formulation, as crit-
ics have observed. The debate on immigrants’ right to cultural asser-
tion by wearing headscarves or turbans, for instance, has been pitched
against constitutional patriotism, whereby the principles of secularism
enshrined in the constitution take priority over the cultural right to
self-expression. Thus, there is no happy coexistence between a thin
conception of culture in constitutional patriotism and a thick aware-
ness of one’s own cultural identity.26 Yet constitutional patriotism
itself emerged as a response to post-war Germany’s separation from its
Nazi political culture and the pursuit of liberal institutions that were
imposed from without. Such patriotism is also rooted in the pre-polit-
ical bonds of European citizenship, as a secondary status that is added
to national citizenship within one of the component states (Habermas
1996: 426). But then the inheritance of the pre-political tie of a so-
called democratic culture through blood bonds determines whether or
not a person is naturally a member of the EU.
Interestingly, Irigaray too idealizes the EU as the source of non-
parochial identity. She defines it as an expansive ‘civil community’
with the task of connecting natural and civil sociability through a
human identity that transcends national, ethnic and cultural identi-
ties (2004: 226). Observing that both individualism and ‘naturalized’
groupings of race, sex and age are hindrances to such citizenship, she
considers the EU the first step towards overcoming such challenges of

24 
See Azad India Foundation 2010, for a detailed account of this prob-
lem in the Berlin district of Neukolln. Also see Özerkan 2010.
25 
As McLaughlin writes, ‘In devising a theory that understands the
life- world as a sphere for discussion but not decision making, Habermas
tacitly accepts the domination of communicative action by systemic
imperatives’ (2004: 169).
26 
As Canovan observes, ‘Habermasian abstraction can make it pos-
sible to talk about highly specific problems while apparently not talking
about them’ (2000: 432).
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  81

the ‘state of nature’ — in particular, the identities of natural groups

(families, tribes, ethnicities) and cultural communities (religions,
cultures, states), as well as those determined by abstract norms (ibid.:
224, 226). For Irigaray, the problem is that the transition from natu-
ral to civil community takes place through the transmission of prop-
erty through the patriarchal family, in which women and children
are subordinated (ibid.: 227). Goods that help to protect life, such
as houses, thus become substitutes for life.27 Against this, Irigaray
considers life to be affirmed when the relationship to the other, ‘the
primitive, the child, the mad person, the disabled person, the worker
and finally, the woman’, is expressed in non-hierarchical terms
through civic identity, in which each has ‘affirmative rights’ regard-
less of race, sex and age — her vision of European citizenship (ibid.:
228–29). Although Irigaray differs from Habermas in pointing to the
fractured naturalistic identity underlying European citizenship, the
solution she proposes is nonetheless an individualistic model of civic
rights, with traces of statism in the form of the EU that upholds these
rights. The post-national identity that emerges from grassroots activ-
ism, such as the women’s movement, is nowhere to be seen in this
vision.
In contrast to both Habermas and Irigaray, the Indian feminist
movement provides a more inclusive and grassroots paradigm of the
postnational, which integrates solidarity amongst diverse people
with justice. Its ‘most prominent . . . voices in the Indian context are
those that have opposed the coming of globalization, and for reasons
well-rehearsed in the literature’ (John 2009: 47). Some of these
reasons include impoverishment and retrenchment from organized
jobs. This movement has created a political sphere both within and
without India, involving diverse actors like interest groups, activists
and citizens. Further, this sphere does not institutionalize either
discussion or decision-making since it operates through a critique
of the nation-state, community and global capital. The Indian fem-
inist movement’s goals of ending sexism and improving relations
between men and women reveals the local and global interface right
from its formative period in the 19th century to its contemporary
phase (ibid.). For instance, during the rise of cultural nationalism
during the late 19th century in colonial Bengal, women’s issues were

27 
Thus, Irigary writes, ‘A culture of life, does not, in fact, exist. A cul-
ture of the body, a culture of the natural sensibility, a culture of ourselves
as living beings, is still lacking’ (2004: 228).
82  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

not taken up in public because nationalism was perceived to have

addressed them (ibid.: 48). Thus, ‘[i]t is not for nothing that the
1950s and 1960s — years when the nation enjoyed a hegemonic sta-
tus among most of its citizens in the eyes of the world — were first
called “the silent period” of the women’s movement’ (ibid.). John
points out that it was under the crisis of the nation in the 1970s that
the women’s movement in India developed as an international force
that also interrogated imperialism and nationalism.
Thus, the women’s movement has never been a local or nationalist,
or even a homogeneous, force.28 Hence, John writes, ‘we are better
served using the notion of the “postnational” as a marker of our pre-
sent. The postnational acknowledges that the nation no longer occu-
pies the sovereign position or horizon of intelligibility’ (2009: 49). It
also provides for a way to critically examine the globalization process,
which is — despite common claims to the contrary — closely tied
to the nation-state. Feminist debates in the 1990s convey the need
to comprehend the specificities of gender through its interface with
race, class, caste, and nation. One of the many ways in which patri-
archy entrenches itself is through unyielding group identities. As has
been argued above, such identities are antithetical to women’s inter-
ests, but have been chosen by women because of the seeming sense of
empowerment that they provide (Sarkar 1995: 210). Further, wom-
en’s participation in organizations espousing such identities emerges
through a rational choice of wanting to enter the public sphere, and
even at times articulating the need for gender justice.29 The femi-
nist movement, in contrast, has articulated women’s struggles for
justice, such as the right to employment opportunity in the organ-
ized sector, the parity of work conditions between the unorganized
and organized sectors, and the right to a work environment without
sexual harassment. These are addressed neither by the administra-
tive measures of the state nor by NGOs. As Nancy Fraser has put it,

28 
John calls for a study of the diverse range of women’s movements
from the 1970s to the current period, to comprehend them both from a
local and international perspective (2009: 49).
29 
Sarkar has observed that women do not join Hindu right organiza-
tions only because they are brainwashed to do so by the men in their
organizations. They do so because of the empowerment they acquire
through their participation in women’s groups. Further, through their
entry in public spaces, they often get thrown into situations of gender
discrimination and violence (Sarkar 1995: 211).
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  83

‘the task is to break the exclusive identification of democracy with

the bounded political community. Joining other progressive forces,
feminists might militate for a new, post-Westphalian political order’
(2009: 117).
Indeed, as grassroots struggles, feminist ones are ‘sub-national’ in
the sense of being critical of the nation, state and community, as well
as ‘transnational’ in aspiring to connect globally through issues per-
taining to gender justice (Menon 2004: 103). Such a feminist postna-
tional is what Menon terms the ‘obverse’ of both corporate globalism
and the transnational civil society of NGOs, both being homogeniz-
ing versions implied by the Habermasian postnational. 30
To return to the challenge of right-wing women, the relation
between individuality and solidarity, as well as between diverse
groups, will open them to the vulnerability of their own militant
group identity. This will become possible only when they consist-
ently foreground women’s issues — such as reproductive freedom —
to forge bonds of power with women from groups other than their
own. When women’s questions are steadily raised, their patriarchal
base is exposed, while a sporadic focus obliterates this base. The prin-
ciple of solidarity acknowledges that each takes ‘responsibility for the
other because as consociates all must have an interest in the integrity
of their shared life context in the same way’ (Habermas 1989–90:
47). The autonomy of individuals and their embeddedness in forms
of life are both kept to balance each other (ibid.: 49). Every partici-
pant in discourse has an irreplaceable unique position; yet each of the
unique claims made by participants in discourse is open to revision in
a process of argumentation in which all persons participate. There is
unrestricted freedom for the individual or group to participate in dia-
logue — only this guarantees its universality. Yet, in order to arrive
at an agreement in such a dialogue situation, there is a need for each
individual or group involved to take the point of view of the oth-
ers in the situation, which in turn is made possible through solidar-
ity (ibid.). Solidarity across diverse cultures would have to appeal to
embodied agents from the domestic sphere to subvert the patriarchal
relations into which women are cast, in order to democratize the

30 
Yet, as Fraser cautions, feminists mobilizing transnational injustices
against women has also fed into neo-liberalism and ‘has ended up dove-
tailing in some respects with the administrative needs of a new form of
capitalism’ (2009: 113). Thus, the postnational spirit mandates a critique
of capital and its role in exacerbating gender injustice.
84  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

public sphere. Solidarity is embodied through the struggle for justice,

especially in the context of the injustices of globalization.
Indeed, issues pertaining to gender justice often encourage alli-
ances amongst women that could disrupt the boundaries of existing
communities. Consider the 15-year-old debate over the Bill reserving
33 per cent of seats for women in the Indian parliament. 31 The Bill
has its share of flaws, in that it confines women to the manifesto of
patriarchal parties and assumes that the physical presence of some
(mostly privileged) women would translate into a perspective of gen-
der justice. 32 Yet those who objected to it on the centenary of the
International Women’s Day when it was the subject of heated debate
in the Lok Sabha (Lower House) did so because of its challenge to
communitarian identities. The Shiv Sena, a prominent Hindu right
organization with a strong women’s wing (discussed above), is against
women’s reservations (Balakrishnan 2010). 33 The spokesperson for
this party maintains that such a Bill will be divisive and suggests
that there be a 33 per cent reservation for women in each political
party to ‘ensure that women are well represented and at the same
time let the parties handpick women of merit’ (ibid.). For extremist
organizations, the Bill presents a threat to women’s entry into politics
under the guardianship of men who ‘hand pick’ them. In an earlier
response to this Bill, the same spokesperson had advised women to
concentrate on more important issues such as stopping the abortion
of female foetuses and female literacy (Hebbar and Gadgil 2008).
However, this advice ignores the fact that these important issues are
linked to women’s discrimination in the larger socio-political land-
scape. Women’s visibility in political decision-making is a small step

31 
This Bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha (Upper House) with a major-
ity on 9 March 2010, but it is yet to be passed in the Lok Sabha (Lower
House) (Times of India, 2010). Recent statistics reveal that India is ranked
at 105 for representation of women in parliament (India Today 2012).
There is 11 per cent representation of women in the Lok Sabha and 10.7
per cent in the Rajya Sabha.
32 
None of the women belonging to the major political parties has a
gender-sensitive manifesto. Further, it has pitched those who belong to
underprivileged castes against women as an abstraction. (See Menon
2000 and Raman 2009).
33 
Within the mainstream Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), there is no
consensus on this issue. One of their prominent women representatives
has supported the Bill, while another has expressed her apprehension.
See Menon 2000 for a discussion.
 Feminist Solidarity in India  F  85

towards remedying such discrimination from the point of view of

this Bill. Indeed, women from different political parties buried their
opposition to each other as leftists and rightists affirmed their soli-
darity for the Bill. Yet, this solidarity is a tokenism, given the pit-
falls of the Bill itself, which, despite having the potential to critique
the community, is not adequately postnational. For it assumes that
the liberal parliament can bring about gender justice in a top-down
fashion. In taking the state apparatus for granted, the Bill overlooks
the fact that only the elite among women can enter parliamentary
decision-making institutions.
In contrast, another Act that affected women’s lives, the
Unorganized Worker’s Security Act of 2008, was passed without any
furore in the parliament a couple of years ago (Goswami 2009). This
Act aims at improving the conditions of workers in the informal sec-
tor, regarding such factors as exploitation, dangerous work conditions,
the absence of a minimum wage and social security benefits, and the
travails of migrancy. These workers in the ‘unfree’ (ibid.), or unorgan-
ized, sector comprise 93 per cent of the Indian workforce and include
a significant presence of women (The Economist 2010). Although this
sector contributes significantly to the economy, the Act does not
spell out either minimum wage or the government’s responsibility to
the workers. It is silent on the problems of women workers, despite
their overwhelming presence in the unorganized sector. 34 Addressing
problems such as parity of remuneration or protection from sexual
harassment in the workplace would prevent women from being
restricted to a position of mothers or widows, or treated as recipients
of government charity. 35 These are problems of gender justice that
stem from the Act’s hesitation to name women as ‘workers’. Hence,
solidarities around justice emerging from the grassroots are, and
would be, those of women from the unorganized sector who question
this Act’s inadequacy. By defining themselves as ‘workers’ in their
struggle for gender-sensitive work conditions, they challenge both the
Act and economic globalization. Moreover, by identifying themselves
as workers despite coming from diverse communities, their solidar-
ity is embodied, unlike that of the (mostly privileged) women who

34 
Goswami points out that the Shramshakti Report (1988), which
addresses the needs of women workers, has not been taken into consid-
eration. Nor does it heed the Supreme Court Guidelines in Vishaka vs
State (1997) regarding sexual harassment (Goswami 2009: 18).
35 
Goswami 2009 observes these perceptions of women workers in the
Act.
86  f  Kanchana Mahadevan

symbolically unite to support the Reservation Bill despite diverse

political ideologies. Such an embodiment consists of critiquing their
communities, the nation and the state, while approaching the post-
national from the grassroots.

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4
Deliberation Without Democracy?
Reflections on Habermas,
Mini-publics and China
William Smith

J ürgen Habermas is a major influence on debates surrounding delib-

erative democracy in contemporary political thought (Bohman
1998). The research agenda associated with his work focuses on
public deliberation at a ‘macro’, or society-wide, level (Fung 2003:
338) and explores discourses in a variety of settings, including legisla-
tive assemblies, civil society and the mass media (Habermas 1996).
While not disappearing, this agenda has recently been supplemented,
and in some cases challenged, by deliberative democrats who focus on
‘micro’ level deliberation (Chambers 2009). This is reflected in the
rise of ‘mini-publics’ — small groups of randomly selected citizens
brought together to debate particular areas of policy — as a subject
for analysis (Dryzek 2010: 27). Their appeal, as one commentator
puts it, ‘is that deliberation in these mini-publics is representative of
— and hence can substitute for — deliberation among mass publics
that simply cannot deliberate together in the same ways’ (Goodin
2008: 11).
The claim that mini-publics can substitute for mass publics opens
up a particularly challenging line of enquiry for democratic theo-
rists in light of the recent use of mini-publics in a society that lacks
Western-style democratic institutions and practices, namely, China
(Lieb and He 2006).1 The aim of this chapter is to explore the extent

1 
These institutions and practices include universal suffrage, competi-
tive multi-party elections, representative institutions, a more-or-less free
press, and legal guarantees of equal rights. This package will be described
variously throughout this chapter as ‘Western-style democracy’, ‘society-
wide democracy’, or ‘mass democracy’.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-6
 Deliberation Without Democracy?  F  91

to which mini-publics can realize deliberative democratic values in

the absence of society-wide democracy. It does so from the perspective
of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy. Although Habermas
focuses on macro deliberation, the development of mini-publics has
been guided by the aim of realizing qualities often associated with
his notion of discursive rationality (Fishkin 2009: 116-17), and his
theory ought therefore also to provide a particularly salient resource
for approaching the important, but hitherto underexplored, issue of
mini-publics in non-democratic societies. Indeed, this chapter will
argue that a Habermasian perspective suggests a supportive yet criti-
cal attitude towards the use of these micro deliberative forums in
non-democratic contexts. While it is not the case that mini-publics
have no value at all in the absence of Western-style democracy, in
order to realize their value to the full it is essential that mini-publics
are related in appropriate ways to deliberation in the broader public
sphere. The nuances of this perspective will be illustrated by taking a
closer look at the case of mini-publics in China, and exploring some
of the questions that a Habermasian theory raises as a subject for
ongoing investigation into these institutional innovations.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section intro-
duces the issues raised by the use of mini-publics in non-democratic
contexts. It focuses in particular on the recent ‘deliberative polls’
that have been conducted in Wenling City, the apparently impres-
sive results of which pose difficult questions about the value of mini-
publics in authoritarian societies. The second section begins the task
of addressing these questions by turning to Habermas. It constructs a
set of three guidelines for evaluating mini-publics in non-democratic
contexts: the extent to which mini-publics contribute to democratic
learning processes; the extent to which mini-publics constitute an
undistorted deliberative forum; and the extent to which appropriate
feedback mechanisms exist between mini- publics and the broader
social and political environment. The third section reconsiders the
example of deliberative polling in China in light of these guidelines.
In particular, it shows how the Hab- ermasian approach acknowl-
edges the value of these forums as a means of contributing to dem-
ocratic learning processes and allowing a limited form of political
participation in an otherwise non- responsive authoritarian state. At
the same time, it explores the limitations of these experiments in the
absence of reliable means of allowing non-participating citizens to
learn about, reflect upon and publicly contest the outcomes of mini-
publics. The distinctive contribution of the Habermasian perspective
is thus, I suggest, its insistence that the extent to which mini-publics
92  f  William Smith

realize deliberative democratic values in non-democratic contexts

turns in part on their relation to the public sphere.

The Use of Mini-Publics in Non-democratic Societies

The analysis of mini-publics is flourishing in deliberative democratic
theory (Fishkin 2009; Parkinson 2006; Smith 2009). This is moti-
vated by the insurmountable obstacles that beset efforts to realize
society-wide democratic deliberation. As Simone Chambers notes,
macro-level deliberation is beset by ‘problems of scale, complexity,
[and] lack of information and knowledge and opportunities to speak
and be heard’ (2009: 330). The micro level, by contrast, appears to
be a more hospitable environment for genuine democratic delibera-
tion. As Archon Fung puts it, ‘in a mini-public that addresses . . .
problems of representation, reasonableness and information, conver-
sations between citizens would dramatically improve the quality of
their public opinion’ (2003: 341).
The appeal of mini-publics for many contemporary theorists, then,
is their potential to correct the deliberative shortcomings of society-
wide democratic practices. However, the majority of cases that are
discussed tend to involve mini-publics operating against the backdrop
of the institutions and practices of mass democracy (Dryzek 2010:
155-76; Goodin 2008: 11-37; Smith 2009: 72-110). Mini-publics
thus tend to be conceptualized as a potential supplement to mass
democracy, rather than as a replacement for them. It is by no means
clear, though, that mini-publics could not function in the absence of
such a background context. A mini-public purchases its legitimacy
through the claim that its debates or decisions are representative of
what the public as a whole would think or do if it could deliber-
ate in an environment more conducive to the emergence of informed
opinion (Fishkin 2009: 54-60). This effect can be achieved through
mechanisms such as random sampling of the population, provision of
briefing materials and expert opinion and discursive settings designed
to promote dialogue between participants. The resulting ‘delibera-
tive opinion’ can then be fed into the policy-making process in a vari-
ety of ways (Goodin 2008: 11-37). In principle, there would seem to
be no reason why a mini- public could not operate in a similar fashion
in a non-democratic context.
Indeed, a recent case of ‘deliberative polling’ in China suggests
that it is possible to introduce apparently successful mini-publics in
societies that depart to an extraordinary degree from the institutions
and practices of Western-style democracy. The deliberative poll,
 Deliberation Without Democracy?  F  93

pioneered by James Fishkin, is a mini-public that brings together a

random sample of the population to discuss a particular issue. The
participants are provided with extensive information and expert
opinion relevant to the issue. Importantly, the participants are
polled before and after their discussions, thus enabling social scien-
tific analysis of the impact that deliberation has on their opinions
(Fishkin 1995: 162). The first Chinese deliberative poll was organ-
ized in Zeguo Township in Wenling City by Chinese Communist
Party (CPP) officials with the assistance of Fishkin and other experts
in 2005 (Fishkin et al. 2010). The object of the poll, which took
place over the course of one day, was to consult a random sample of
citizens about which of thirty possible infrastructure projects should
be funded in the coming year. The poll was assessed against a number
of criteria to test the quality and impact of deliberation, with results
that observers present as highly impressive:

First, the sample was highly representative. The selection was ran-
dom, except within the household (which led to a notable but sub-
sequently remedied gender bias). Secondly, deliberation brought
significant net attitude change — and this despite the deliberations
having lasted only a day.... Thirdly, the attitude change exhibited
several normatively desirable properties. There was no tendency to
change in the direction of the opinions held by higher status or more
privileged participants. There was no consistent pattern of polari-
zation. There was an increase in public-spiritedness, in the sense
that the participants grew more interested in projects benefiting the
broader community, rather than just their own villages. The partici-
pants became more informed, and the opinion changes and informa-
tion gains were related. Those who emerged knowing the most were
disproportionately responsible for the overall changes of opinion.
Lastly, the results were a decisive input into the policy process. All
twelve of the projects the participants ranked highest after deliber-
ating have been built. None of the projects they ranked lower has
been (ibid.: 446).

The last point is particularly striking. As Fishkin notes, Wenling City

is one of the few cases in which officials in democratic or non-dem-
ocratic societies have implemented as public policy the deliberative
opinion that emerged from the poll (2009: 156). That the implemen-
tation of a deliberatively-filtered public opinion into policy has taken
place in a broadly authoritarian system, rather than an established
democracy, is somewhat surprising.
94  f  William Smith

The apparent implication of this Chinese deliberative poll — and

polls that have been conducted subsequently (He and Warren 2011)
— is that one can implement mini-publics in social and political con-
texts that are not particularly democratic. This is interesting for at
least two reasons. First, critics might doubt the capacity of mini-pub-
lics to exert any influence over policy in political systems that lack
the mechanisms of accountability associated with mass democracy.
The thought here is that in the absence of universal suffrage, politi-
cal leaders will be under no pressure to take account of mini-public
recommendations. But Baogang He has identified several reasons why
some officials in China, at least at local or regional levels, are recep-
tive to the recommendations of mini-publics despite the absence of
democratic accountability. These include the aims of securing social
consensus for policies and gaining greater insight into public percep-
tions of these polices (He 2006: 176-79).
Second, critics might doubt the capacity of mini-publics to function
in the absence of the cultural backdrop associated with Western-style
democracy. The thought here is that participation in mini-publics
requires a citizenry that has already been schooled in the habits of
democratic citizenship. The Chinese cases repudiates this some-
what ethnocentric view by showing that mini-publics can flourish
in diverse cultural settings, partly through utilizing pre- deliberative
preparation techniques, but also through exploiting contingent cul-
tural factors. Baogang He emphasizes that deliberative experiments
in China draw on an indigenous tradition of consultation at local lev-
els, such as the ‘kentan’ meetings or ‘sincere heart-to-heart discus-
sions’ that had previously been established by officials in Wenling
City (ibid.: 179-81). There is, then, no necessary correlation between
functioning mini-publics and the culture and traditions of Western-
style democracy. These reflections on the Chinese deliberative polls
might be presented as encouraging, insofar as mini-publics emerge as
feasible methods of embedding democratic values in social and politi-
cal contexts that are highly resistant to the kind of top-down, system-
level reforms that would be necessary for Western-style democracy.
There is, though, a formidable challenge facing observers who
want to engage in normative evaluation of mini-publics in con-
texts such as China. The various standards that have been deployed
to evaluate mini-publics are in part a response to their use within
democratic contexts (Smith 2009). The concern is that these stand-
ards may require a certain degree of reinterpretation if the aim is to
evaluate mini-publics in non-democratic contexts. It is, for instance,
striking that the criteria employed by Fishkin and his colleagues in
 Deliberation Without Democracy?  F  95

their assessment of the Chinese deliberative polls — such as the rep-

resentativeness of the sample, the occurrence, magnitude and sources
of opinion change and the influence of the recommendations on pol-
icy — are the same as those that would be invoked to assess such a
poll in democratic contexts (2010: 437). While it is of course rea-
sonable and important to evaluate the polls along these lines, it also
appears necessary to incorporate considerations that are more specific
to the challenges of implementing mini-publics in non-democratic
contexts. In China, the evaluation of mini-publics must be respon-
sive to concerns that CCP officials routinely employ forms of public
consultation as a means of checking social unrest and channelling
political dissent into manageable avenues (Hess 2009). In this respect
— as Fishkin and others are aware — there is a danger that mini-
publics might be exploited by political elites to forestall the achieve-
ment of more radical system-level reforms (Fishkin 2009: 110). The
point of raising this concern is not to contend that the Chinese polls
have no value, but to emphasize that the status of mini-publics in
non-democratic contexts is a contentious and underexplored topic
(Dryzek 2010: 135-54). Emerging debates would benefit from the
elaboration of guidelines that, although also of potential application
in democratic contexts, are designed in the first instance to orientate
normative evaluations in non-democratic contexts. These guidelines,
even if they are not sufficient to resolve controversy about particular
cases, might at least lend focus and structure to their assessment.

A Habermasian Perspective on Mini-publics

in Non-democratic Societies
The rest of this chapter investigates the potential and limits of mini-
publics in non-democratic contexts by turning to Habermas’ writings
on deliberative democracy. This move may appear strange given that,
as noted at the outset of this chapter, his theory tends to prioritize
macro-level deliberation over the micro-level debates epitomized
by mini-publics (Goodin 2008: 258-63). Yet, as his recent writings
imply, there is no reason why his theory cannot incorporate empirical
analysis and institutional use of mini-publics as an important ele-
ment of deliberative democracy (Habermas 2009: 145-52). A more
serious challenge is that Habermas has not written extensively on
deliberation in non-democratic contexts, preferring to focus on ‘the
political role played by national public spheres in the liberal con-
stitutional states of the West’ (ibid.: 181). The following discussion
addresses this challenge by constructing guidelines for the evaluation
96  f  William Smith

of mini-publics in non-democratic contexts, which extrapolate and

build upon ideas associated with Habermas’ theory of deliberative
democracy.
The first guideline is that mini-publics should contribute to col-
lective learning processes geared towards the cultivation of demo-
cratic citizenship. The concept of a learning process is introduced
by Habermas in a number of contexts to refer to the complex set
of processes through which a group of individuals develop a collec-
tive political identity (2001: 102). The importance of this process
is alluded to by Habermas in his account of the cultural precon-
ditions of deliberative democracy, amongst which he includes ‘the
basic attitudes, mediated through tradition and socialization, of a
population accustomed to freedom’ (1996: 487). The thought here
appears to be that, in order to achieve the necessary ties of solidarity
among citizens, there must be widespread identification with shared
democratic institutions and practices. This requirement is discussed
at length by James Bohman in the context of an investigation into
the emergence of a sense of democratic citizenship at ‘transnational’
levels. Of particular relevance is Bohman’s claim that mini-publics
addressed to a transnational agenda might play a role in this process.
These micro-deliberative forums, he suggests, ‘rely on experimental
efforts to convene citizens and create selfconsciously organized pub-
lics’ (Bohman 2007: 88). This insight can be applied to the evalu-
ation of mini-publics within non-democratic contexts. A challenge
for democratization is to promote attitudes and identities on the part
of citizens that are conducive to the longterm achievement of stable
democratic institutions. This includes a willingness on the part of
citizens to engage in and with politics, to listen to the opinions of
others, and to take seriously proposals that appear to benefit the
community as a whole (Miller 2000: 82-89). The organization of
mini-publics in non-democratic societies can contribute to this,
insofar as it encourages participants to engage in mutually respect-
ful dialogue and exposes them to considerations relevant to societal
interests. The opportunities for a social scientific analysis of atti-
tude change among participants can also offer empirical support for
claims about the positive or negative contributions of mini-publics
to collective learning processes.
The second guideline is that mini-publics should be structured in
such a way that they approximate as much as possible to Habermas’
ideal of discursive rationality. The idea of discursive rationality refers
to a process of reason-giving between participants committed to
the resolution of collective problems on terms that all could accept
 Deliberation Without Democracy?  F  97

(Habermas 1996: 151-68).2 It specifies idealized conditions for delib-

eration that can be invoked as counterfactual standards against which
actual deliberation can be evaluated, such as equality among par-
ticipants, reciprocal reason-giving, analysis of information, and non-
coercion (ibid.: 322-3). To achieve this, it is especially important that
the deliberations of mini-publics be as free as possible from office
holders’ efforts to steer debate and decisions in ways that are objec-
tionably paternalistic or even manipulative (Niemeyer 2011: 125).
This is a challenge in both democratic and non-democratic contexts,
but is particularly significant in authoritarian systems given that
such regimes possess more-or-less uncontested institutional capac-
ity to shape the design and deliberations of participatory forums. It
is also important to ensure that the deliberations of mini-publics are
protected against the effects of status inequalities among the par-
ticipants. This is also a challenge in democratic and non-democratic
contexts, but may again be particularly significant in the latter, given
that the broader social and cultural environment has not been shaped
by liberal or democratic values (Fishkin et al. 2010: 437).
The third guideline is that appropriate feedback mechanisms must
exist between mini-publics and the broader political and societal
environment. This guideline has two parts, relating to the impact
of mini-publics on deliberation within institutions and throughout
society as a whole. First, the mini-public should enable participants
to subject political power to effective critical scrutiny. This requires
that office holders engage with the recommendations of mini-publics
in the policy-making process. The most obvious means of satisfying
this requirement would be to implement recommendations as policy,
but officials can also meet the standard to some degree by provid-
ing formal responses to its recommendations or putting them to the
wider public in the form of a popular referendum (Dryzek 2010:
168-69). Second, the mini-public should stand in a particular type
of relation to the informal public sphere. This is perhaps the more
complex component of the guideline, so it is necessary to spend some
time explaining its requirements. The public sphere is the network
of public forums that host discussions by various actors of pressing
social and political issues. It performs the important function of con-
tributing to the emergence of informed public opinion:

On the important distinction between discursive rationality and

2 

communicative rationality, which is often blurred in commentaries on

Habermas, see Blau 2011: 47-50.
98  f  William Smith

The deliberative model conceives of the public sphere as a sounding

board for registering problems which affect society as a whole, and
at the same time as a discursive filter-bed which shifts interest-gen-
eralizing and informative contributions to relevant topics out of the
unregulated processes of opinion formation, broadcasts these ‘public
opinions’ back onto the dispersed public of citizens and puts them on
the formal agendas of the responsible bodies (Habermas 2009: 143).

The public sphere operates as a conduit for exchanges of information

between civil society and the state. It also operates as a filter insofar
as opinions are subjected to a form of critical scrutiny that enables
reasonable and informed attitudes to emerge. These operations pre-
suppose that actors are capable of mobilizing relevant issues, infor-
mation and arguments in the public realm and that the mass media,
through news reporting and published opinions, contribute to the
dissemination and evaluation of these inputs to public deliberation.
The public sphere also contributes to the social and political envi-
ronment within which personal autonomy is exercised. It is a con-
stitutive feature of that environment, in the sense that it facilitates
the acquisition by persons of the knowledge and skills necessary to
make effective use of their rights (Habermas 1996: 410-11). The pub-
lic sphere thus empowers citizens through enabling them to benefit
from the circulation and testing of information and opinions relevant
to issues that concern them (Habermas 2009: 172-73).
The second part of the third guideline assumes that the value of
mini-publics depends in part on the extent to which they contrib-
ute to the successful operation of the public sphere. These contri-
butions can only be made if deliberations of mini-publics gain the
appropriate kinds of exposure and dissemination in the public sphere
(Niemeyer 2011: 125-26). The importance of this is that it enables
mini-publics to benefit not only those who participate or those public
officials who might take their recommendations on board in policy-
making, but also non-participants insofar as they engage with, learn
from and contest their deliberations. The first, most simple, require-
ment of this is that mini-publics should receive adequate amounts of
coverage in local and national media outlets. The advantages of such
coverage are noted by many analysts of mini-publics (Smith 2009:
102). A mini-public can lead to changes in the tone and content of
public debate, insofar as ‘its deliberations can bring to the surface
issues which then resonate with the broader public’ (Fishkin 2009:
149). The dissemination of decisions made by mini-publics can also
impact on the preferences and opinions of non-participants, ‘if they
 Deliberation Without Democracy?  F  99

[become] persuaded that they ought to shift their own preferences in

line with those of their more informed but otherwise identical coun-
terparts’ (Goodin 2008: 23). And it can lead to the mobilization of
marginalized groups that might benefit from the design and decisions
of mini-publics, since ‘a novel institution that effectively addresses
some urgent public problem or creates channels of voice for those
who were excluded may mobilize support for its continued existence’
(Fung 2003: 352).
The necessity of promoting the right kind of impact on public
discussion and individual preferences also leads to a second require-
ment, however. This requirement relates less to the quantity and
more to the quality of the media coverage triggered by mini-publics.
The coverage that mini-publics receive should contribute to the pool
of considered arguments and reflective opinions in the public sphere,
as well as engaging the critical faculties of non-participating citizens.
These requirements are discussed at length by Simon Niemeyer, in
an insightful analysis of the potential and limits of mini-publics as
mechanisms for enhancing the deliberative credentials of the public
sphere. He points to the dangers of reporting the outcomes of mini-
publics merely as ‘aggregated preferences’ — that is, in the form of
statements such as ‘the mini-public arrived at conclusion x’ (Niemeyer
2011: 126). The problem with such coverage is that it communicates
the outcomes of mini-publics without conveying the richness of the
deliberative process that led to them, thus failing to contribute to
the pool of reasons and arguments available for opinion-formation.
It also runs the risk of triggering passive or, even worse, imitative
responses on the part of non-participating citizens, thus failing to
engage their capacity to understand the issues and considerations
that support a particular conclusion. Although media coverage can-
not convey or replicate the full range of arguments and opinions that
are expressed in mini- public deliberations, Niemeyer suggests that
it would be preferable for outcomes of mini-publics to be reported
not merely as aggregated preferences, but as ‘simplified reasons’ —
that is, in the form of statements such as ‘the mini-public favoured
conclusion x because of reason y’. This would provide mass publics
with an accessible means of digesting the outcomes of mini-publics,
while providing some ‘prompts’ through which citizens may recog-
nize and engage with the considerations that led to those outcomes
(ibid.: 127-28). The general idea behind the third guideline, then,
is that a comprehensive evaluation of the deliberative democratic
value of mini-publics in non-democratic contexts must include, as an
essential element, the extent to which they trigger informative and
100  f  William Smith

empowering deliberation at the macro level of society. This is par-

ticularly important in authoritarian contexts where substantial legal
or social constraints may be placed on the circulation of opinion and
information in the public sphere.

Reconsidering the Chinese Deliberative Polls

The Habermasian guidelines sketched above aim to lend some struc-
ture to evaluations of mini-publics in non-democratic societies.
The evaluations incorporate a certain degree of complexity, in that
a mini-public may warrant praise in relation to one or two of the
guidelines and criticism in relation to another. The following discus-
sion illustrates this aspect through a reconsideration of the Chinese
deliberative polls discussed in the first section. The polls appear to
warrant praise in terms of their contribution to collective democratic
learning processes and their capacity to subject officials to scrutiny
through an imperfect but authentic deliberative process. The polls
are, however, harder to commend in terms of their capacity to trigger
the appropriate kinds of feedback mechanisms between mini-publics
and the public sphere.
The first guideline draws attention to the extent to which mini-
publics in non-democratic contexts contribute to long-term collective
learning processes. The scholarly literature on various experiments
in deliberative and consultative mechanisms in China provides some
anecdotal evidence in support of the claim that participants culti-
vate skills and dispositions that are often associated with democratic
citizenship. Baogang He, in a discussion of deliberative engagements
between officials and citizens in Hangzhou, notes that ‘all citizens
were able to learn about the perspectives of others and were able
to discuss respectfully difficult issues that affected a broader com-
munity of fate’ (2006: 190). The experience of Chinese deliberative
polling supports this contention, with the advantage that polling the
attitudes of participants before and after deliberation replaces anec-
dotal observations with social scientific evidence.
As noted in the first section, the analysis of the poll conducted by
Fishkin and his colleagues identify substantial evidence of knowledge
gains and public spiritedness on the part of participants. The analysis
identifies a statistical correlation of 0.655 between changes in the
policy priorities of participants and the ‘shared benefit rating’ of pro-
jects under consideration — in other words, support for funding a
particular project tends to increase as participants gain greater aware-
ness of its benefits for a large number of people (Fishkin et al. 2010:
 Deliberation Without Democracy?  F  101

441). These impacts of the polls on the value horizons of citizens

appear to be limited to participants, but there are also indications
that the polls impact on the attitudes of a wider range of citizens.
Baogang He and Mark Warren report that the CCP party secretary
in Wenling City regularly receives complaints if local officials make
decisions without deliberative consultation. In addition, ‘officials in
Zeguo, a township in Wenling, continue to repeat deliberative polling
in part because they worry that not to do so would violate expecta-
tions created by earlier experiments’ (2011: 283-84). This implies
that the use of deliberative polls impacts on non-participating citi-
zens, insofar as they come to expect and demand that this form of
consultation be retained in the political system. The spread of such
an expectation throughout the population is an important element of
a collective learning process, which has as its end goal the emergence
of an active and informed democratic citizenry. This impact is also
relevant to the concern, noted in the first section, that officials can
exploit mini- publics to frustrate thoroughgoing democratic reform.
Indeed, it might even be the case that ‘the inherent logic of delibera-
tive institutions may push China past the moderate form of democ-
racy that was intended by Beijing’ (He 2006: 178).
The second guideline focuses on the extent to which mini-publics
in non-democratic contexts approximate the idealized conditions
associated with Habermas’ concept of discursive rationality. It might
be suspected that the extent to which Chinese deliberative polls sat-
isfy this criterion is limited by the broader context in which they
operate. The constraints imposed by the political environment in
China have led even sympathetic observers to characterize the polls
as instances of ‘authoritarian deliberation’ rather than ‘democratic
deliberation’ (He and Warren 2011). This reflects the fact that the
polls are initiated by officials rather than citizens, that their agenda
and remit are determined by political elites and that there is no
effective system of impartial monitoring (He 2006: 193). However,
despite these legitimate concerns, there are several respects in which
the polls appear to perform surprisingly well as instantiations of gen-
uine democratic deliberation, albeit within an authoritarian society.
The basis for this contention is that the internal deliberations of the
polls appear to be protected to a significant degree from external
pressure by officials and internal power dynamics between partici-
pants. This may reflect careful precautions taken by organizers, such
as the use of local high school teachers, rather than party officials,
as trained moderators to small group discussions (Fishkin et al.
2010: 439). The organizers also observed that participants defined as
102  f  William Smith

‘privileged’ or of ‘high status’ — men, the more highly educated and

entrepreneurs or merchants — tended not to dominate proceedings,
reflected in the fact that their opinions actually declined in support
during the deliberative process (ibid.: 442). These reflections suggest
that mini-publics that are not systematically distorted by political or
social power can emerge in non-democratic contexts. This cautious
conclusion should, though, be tempered by acknowledging that the
apparently positive experience of Chinese deliberative polls is based
on a limited number of cases in local, rather than national, settings
(He and Warren 2011: 276-79).
The third guideline focuses on the relationship between mini-pub-
lics and the broader environment. The first component of this guide-
line relates to the relationship between the mini-publics and formal
institutional deliberation. In this respect, once again, the Chinese
polls appear to perform surprisingly well. As noted previously, the
administration in Zeguo implemented the recommendations of the
first deliberative poll as public policy. In addition, the administra-
tion has been willing to repeat the polling process several times, with
clear signs that the organization of successive polls is having benefi-
cial impacts in terms of improving and refining the process (He and
Thøgersen 2010: 678-81). Opinion surveys in Zeguo reveal that citi-
zens are becoming more confident in the willingness of officials to
respond to deliberative polling: ‘the mean response to the question,
“Will the government take deliberative polling seriously?”, on a 0 to
10 scale, where one is “unlikely” and 10 is “the most likely” was 7.55
in the 2005 survey, but increased to 8.43 in the 2006 survey’ (He and
Warren 2011: 284). There does, then, appear to be some evidence
that deliberative polls trigger a responsive reaction from officials.
The second component of this guideline relates to the nature and
extent of the coverage that mini-publics receive in various forms of
media — print, television and online — that have the potential to
reach local or national audiences in non-democratic societies. The
hope is that mini-publics will impact on the public sphere in such
a way that non-participating citizens can learn from and contest
their deliberations and recommendations. 3 The performance of the

3 
The following analysis presupposes that, although it lacks a pub-
lic sphere that is structured along more or less democratic lines, China
does possess a number of public forums within which issues of common
concern are the subject of (restricted) debates. The constraints imposed
upon this space, as shall become clear, have implications for the nor-
mative evaluation of mini-publics in Chinese society. An interesting
 Deliberation Without Democracy?  F  103

Chinese deliberative polls according to this criterion is much harder

to gauge. Admittedly, the pressure that the local population exerts
on officials in Zeguo to continue the polls implies that there must
be some regional awareness of their operations. It is unfortunate that
the available accounts provide little indication of the process through
which this awareness is cultivated, or the extent to which the polls
impact on broader or nation-wide debates in China. This is because
the scholarly literature tends not to devote as much attention to the
issue of media coverage as it does to other aspects of the polls. The
admirable account of the first Zeguo poll provided by Fishkin and his
associates (2010), for instance, focuses almost entirely on the com-
position of the mini-public, the dynamics of its internal deliberations
and its subsequent impact on the policy-making process. It does not
provide information about the quantity and quality of coverage that
the poll received in the local or national media. In another account,
Fishkin briefly notes that the poll received less coverage in broadcast
or print media than one would expect to see for comparable endeav-
ours in democratic contexts (2009: 147).4 This must be regarded as
a disappointment, particularly given that organizers of deliberative
polls typically make strenuous efforts to ensure that deliberations
are broadcast on television and reported in newspapers and journals
(Smith 2009: 104). A serious additional problem is that media out-
lets in China are often under pressure to present events in a favour-
able light for public officials. Baogang He notes that the presence of
a large number of journalists at consultative meetings is sometimes
an indication that ‘the deliberative institutional experiment is part of
more general propaganda efforts’ (2006: 193). These pressures can-
not help but reduce the likelihood that local and national publics in
China will benefit from accurate reporting of the deliberations and
recommendations of mini-publics. This lack of coverage, and the
skewed nature of the coverage given, must be expected in authori-
tarian contexts, where media organizations are not sufficiently inde-
pendent from state power (Habermas 2009: 157).

application of Habermas’ concept of the public sphere to the scholarly

aim of understanding the development of modern China is provided by
Rowe 1990. A recent analysis of the evolution of mass media in Chinese
society, including an account of its complex relation to the state, can be
found in Zhang 2011.
4 
At the same time, Fishkin reports that neglect of the polls by television
and newspapers in China is partially off-set by intense local interest and, of
particular note, widespread discussion on the internet (2009: 155).
104  f  William Smith

The apparent absence of extensive coverage of the polls in the

media, coupled with concerns about the political pressures brought
to bear on whatever coverage might emerge, at least raises serious
doubts about the extent to which these mini-publics impact on
the public sphere. The point of raising this concern is not to make
easy criticisms at efforts to introduce deliberative forms of consul-
tation and decision-making within the challenging context of con-
temporary China. Rather, it is to highlight the potential value of
the Habermasian perspective developed in this chapter for ongoing
research into mini-publics within contexts that depart from the
institutions and practices of Western democracy. The social scien-
tific evidence generated by experiments like the Zeguo polls could
be enriched if it provided greater insight into the feedback mecha-
nisms that do, or do not, exist between mini-publics and non-partic-
ipating publics. This might include addressing questions such as: To
what extent are mini-publics reported in local and/or national broad-
cast and print media? Does the coverage report ‘simplified reasons’
or merely ‘aggregated preferences’ of mini-publics? Do mini-publics
generate opinion pieces in high quality media outlets? What impact,
if any, does such media coverage have on public officials? How, if at
all, does online coverage differ from coverage in state-owned media?
Are there any effective feedback mechanisms that allow non-partic-
ipating citizens to communicate opinions or concerns about mini-
publics to organizers and/or officials? The value of addressing such
questions would lie in providing some insight into whether and to
what extent mini-publics in China are, or could become, an element
of a broader process of public deliberation. If the evidence suggests
that mini-publics trigger public debates that educate and empower
non-participating citizens, this would provide further reasons to
support these endeavours as instantiations of democratic value in
highly challenging circumstances. If, as seems to be the case, the
evidence confirms fears that mini-publics are not receiving the right
kind of publicity in the media or, even worse, that reporting of these
events is tailored to the goal of generating propaganda for authoritar-
ian rulers, then this would be a reason to exercise a certain degree of
caution about their value and role.

Conclusion
This chapter has applied Habermasian ideas to assess the strengths
and weaknesses of mini-publics in non-democratic societies. Its focus
has been on the promising, if not entirely unproblematic, experiments
 Deliberation Without Democracy?  F  105

in deliberative polling that have been carried out in recent years in

China. In conclusion, it is worth considering a possible objection to
the approach adopted. For its guidelines might appear to presup-
pose that the strengths and weaknesses of mini- publics in non-dem-
ocratic societies are to be measured according to their contribution
to the long-term realization of ‘Western-style’ democratic institu-
tions. Indeed, according to some commentators, these institutions
dominate Habermas’ theory of democracy, since despite its focus on
‘anarchic’ deliberation in the public sphere, it ultimately identifies
democracy with fairly conventional modes of electoral representation
(Dryzek 2010: 63). The worry, then, is that such a perspective lim-
its the scope for societies to pursue modes of self-organization that
depart from the experiences of the West. This is not an objection
that can be addressed in any detail here, but it should be noted that
the Habermasian guidelines sketched in this chapter are framed in
quite general terms that allow for a considerable degree of interpreta-
tion. Although the value of mini-publics depends, in part, on their
contribution to democratizing learning processes, it is by no means
evident that the final destination must be the ‘well-defined package’
of institutions that Western observers tend to identify with democ-
racy (ibid.: 147). In fact, studying the impact of mini-publics on the
development of non-democratic societies may afford opportunities for
critical reflection on assumptions about democracy that inform the
ideas of theorists such as Habermas. In other words, an implication
of taking Habermasian theory out of its Western comfort zone is that
we might gain greater insight into not only the scope and applicability
of its normative claims, but also the extent to which some of these
claims may need to be revisited and revised in the light of experiences
in non-Western contexts.

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 Part II
Decolonizing


5
Defending Habermas
against Eurocentrism
Latin America and Mignolo’s
Decolonial Challenge
Raymond Morrow

T he task of this chapter will be to consider some of the implica-

tions of the relation between Jürgen Habermas’ critical social theory
and postcolonial theory in the distinctive context of Latin America.
Although contemporary social research presupposes that these socie-
ties can be comprehended through the contextual re-specification
and revision of the categories of Euro-American philosophy and social
science, the most influential effort to construct a Latin American
‘postcolonial’ theory — namely, the coloniality/modernity research
programme led by Walter Mignolo — has called into question such
‘colonial’ strategies. Habermas in particular has been chastized for
his ‘Eurocentric fundamentalism’ (Grosfoguel et al. 2007). Such
polemical characterizations not only discourage more reasoned
dialogue, they also reflect a more general lack of awareness of the
potential contributions of Habermas’ theory to many of the ques-
tions addressed in postcolonial theory. Accordingly, the argument
developed here will be that those who have recently been involved
in critically appropriating aspects of the Habermasian tradition in
Latin America need not see their efforts as jeopardized by charges of
Eurocentricism. Nevertheless, the ‘decolonial’ challenge represented
by Mignolo does suggest the need for greater sensitivity to some of
the issues posed by postcolonial theories.
The three sections of the following discussion can be summarized
as follows. The first section will provide a brief introduction to Latin
American philosophy and social theory through a discussion of the
dominant modernist, ‘universalistic’ tradition and its reception of the
Frankfurt School legacy, and especially of Habermas. The second will

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-8
112  f  Raymond Morrow

focus on the challenge to Habermas’ social theory represented by the

‘modernity/coloniality research programme’, as synthesized in the
‘geopolitics of knowledge’ of Walter Mignolo. The third section will
suggest that Habermas’ notion of modernity as an ‘unfinished project’
can incorporate multiple modernities and issues of cultural diversity.
In conclusion, it will be argued that Habermas — allied with insights
from some of his sympathetic critics and ‘postoccidentalist’ thinkers
such as the Brazilian educational theorist, Paulo Freire, and the phi-
losopher, Eduardo Mendieta — provides a more persuasive account
of the conditions of possibility of the intercultural dialogue necessary
for reducing the pathologies of modernity in Latin America.
To begin, it is instructive to ask whether ‘Latin America’ might
be considered ‘non-Western’. Although Latin American courses
generally qualify as non-Western in the undergraduate curricula of
the United States, this assumption has been conventionally rejected
by cultural theorists because of the absence of a non-Western her-
itage based on ‘universal’ religions such as Islam, Hinduism or
Confucianism. Nevertheless, there has been a dissident tradition,
more recently associated with intercultural and liberation philoso-
phy, that has sought to bring attention to those ‘others’ — such as
descendants of slaves and indigenous peoples — who were marginal-
ized within Latin American modernity.
Comparative inter-civilizational analysis provides a framework for
understanding the New World in terms of four ‘modernities’: the US,
Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America (with Brazil as a distinc-
tive region). Moreover, the more recent revitalization of indigenous
cultures suggests perhaps a fifth ‘modernity’ that includes the ‘col-
onized’ populations of African slaves, and especially the originary
peoples deriving from pre-Columbian civilizations (Smith 2010). At
the same time, however, this possible additional civilizational cat-
egory is highly heterogeneous, dispersed in various nation-states and
formed through a process of colonial destruction and post-conquest
reconfiguration that included five centuries of contact with moder-
nity. Moreover, this partially non-Western, hybrid underside of the
New World affects all four modernities — Canada and the US only
differ in being English (and French) settler colonies and thus hav-
ing distinct political institutions and limited mixing with the indig-
enous population. In some parts of Latin America, the significance
of these marginalized populations is far greater and characterized
by much higher rates of exclusion. Indigenous peoples (not includ-
ing assimilated mestizos) make up around 10 per cent of the over-
all population, although they are concentrated in five countries in
 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism  F  113

which they represent between 10 and 50 per cent of the population,

namely, Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico. Those of
African descent constitute around 30 per cent of the total (including
mixed categories), again highly concentrated in Brazil and around the
Caribbean (Hooker 2005).

Latin American Modernity and

the Frankfurt Tradition
Given the context of early 19th-century independence movements
against Spain and Portugal, Latin American elites shared a universal-
istic European orientation defined by being ‘modernist’ in a region
characterized by chronically failing ‘modernization’. Although now
often criticized as ‘Eurocentric’ in postcolonial literature, the recep-
tion of European culture and philosophy was not purely imitative
and reflected local conditions, as well as the diverse perspectives
of national intellectual elites. Positivist social science and Marxism
became major forces in the academic world in the post- World War
II period, at which point influences from the United States began
to supplement those from Europe. In the mid-1980s, however,
Latin American Marxism underwent a prolonged crisis, with many
defecting to the emerging democratic options and a new focus on
civil society and social movements as bases for radical democratic
reform (Castaneda 1993). Despite its roots in the European tradition,
a distinctive tradition of Latin American philosophy has also become
increasingly visible (Mendieta 2003b).
The reception of the earlier Frankfurt School tradition and
Habermas in Latin America has been shaped by several characteris-
tics of the ecology of knowledge production. Brazil is the leading cen-
tre for discussion of the Frankfurt tradition generally, partly because
it has been the site of Portuguese translations and has by far the high-
est level of investment in higher education and research (Pucci 2009).
Further, the relative success of the Lula regime created a practical
laboratory for debates about deliberative democracy and education,
symbolized in the work and example of Paulo Freire, whose approach
has been taken to have significant affinities with Habermas’ theory of
communicative action (Morrow and Torres 2002).
In contrast, Spain has been the primary centre for translation and
reception in Spanish, as well as the training of many Latin American
doctoral students. Only more recently have some doctoral students
been studying at the renewed Frankfurt Institute for Social Research
headed by Axel Honneth (Basaure 2010) and the New School for
114  f  Raymond Morrow

Social Research in New York. Mexico and Argentina have been the
most important sources of reception in Spanish in Latin America,
as secondary publishing centres with strong philosophical and social
theoretical traditions. Indeed, the recent occasion of the signing of a
cooperative agreement between the Instituto Germano-Argentina and
Honneth’s Frankfurt programme provided an occasion to recall that
‘Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas are also Argentines’ (Bilbao 2010)
— a point referring to Felix Weil (1898-1975), who used his father’s
business fortune gained in Argentina to fund the original Frankfurt
Institute for Social Research. Erich Fromm had also moved to Mexico
City in the mid-1960s, thus giving the older Frankfurt tradition a sig-
nificant profile.
The reception of Habermas has been particularly problematic out-
side of Brazil for a variety of reasons. The predominance of orthodox
Marxist debates into the late 1980s contributed to a very limited
response to the early Habermas’ theory of knowledge interests,
whereas on the traditional Left, the theory of communicative action
was greeted with widespread disappointment and, indeed, often
superficially considered a ‘turn to the right’. His post-metaphysical
insistence on the more limited role of philosophy has also found little
sympathy from more traditional philosophers and theologians, who
have been more interested in the older tradition of Adorno, Marcuse
and Benjamin.
Only with the revival of discussions of civil society, the public
sphere and deliberative democracy in the 1990s has Habermas’ work
enjoyed an extensive, if selective, reception in the social sciences,
especially communications, education, democratic theory and law
reform (Morrow 2010). It is more appropriate here to perhaps speak
of the reception of a ‘Habermasian tradition’, given that discussions
often include some of those with whom he has engaged in debate
— such as Taylor, Rorty and Rawls — as well as his sympathetic crit-
ics close to the Frankfurt tradition, especially Axel Honneth and
Nancy Fraser (Mendoga 2007). The recent widespread reception
of Honneth’s theory of recognition in particular promises to have a
major impact on research in the near future (Saavedra and Sobottka
2009; Sauerwald 2008).
To conclude, there are several features of the current Habermas
reception that can be highlighted. First, it does not involve a simple
imitative application of theoretical concepts and gives little evidence
of an overt ‘colonial’ mentality, as opposed to autonomous, reflexive
appropriation and empirical case study analysis. Second, the discus-
sion of Habermas in the social sciences is part of a wider reception of
 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism  F  115

the ‘critical’ democratic, legal and social movement literature. And

third, the question of Habermas’ ‘Eurocentrism’ is not a preoccupa-
tion, and Mignolo’s modernity/coloniality research programme has for
the most part been ignored in the Habermas reception. Nevertheless,
as the next section suggests, decolonial theory does represent a chal-
lenge to Habermas’ critical theory which needs to be addressed.

Mignolo and the Modernity/

Coloniality Research Programme
The ‘Modernity/Coloniality Research Program’ (also referred to as
the ‘Decolonial Option’ or ‘Decolonial Turn’) refers to the ambitious
project of a loose interdisciplinary network of scholars led by Walter
Mignolo (Duke University), whose members have met at various points
from 1998 onwards (Grosfoguel 2008; Mignolo 2007b), becoming the
most influential tendency within the broader context of the ‘postcolo-
nial’ in Latin America (Morana et al. 2008). As Scott Michaelsen and
Scott Cutler Shershow have put it,

For better or for worse, Walter D. Mignolo’s work on the problem of

colonialism has had a sizable impact on the field of Latin American
studies. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that his books tend to
monopolize, in our time, the question of Latin American ‘dissenting
imaginaries’ (2007: 39).

The group emerged out of the failure of efforts to develop a Latin

American ‘subaltern studies’ network. The project defined itself
in opposition to existing postmodern, postcolonial and subaltern
theory, as well as related forms of identity politics and multicultur-
alism. Whereas postmodernism was criticized for both relativism and
being part of a Eurocentric critique of modernity, postcolonial and
subaltern theory were charged with excessive reliance on European
theorists and over-generalizing the experiences of English coloni-
alism. Indeed, the group rejects the term ‘postcolonial’ because of
the implication that colonialism ended two centuries ago with the
success of independence movements in Latin America. The group
also explicitly rejects the Marxist tradition as Eurocentric, and hence
limited by its origins in the ‘local history of Europe’ and its class
conflicts.
Mignolo turned to the decolonial project late in his career.
Although he grew up in a rural Italian immigrant family in Argentina,
116  f  Raymond Morrow

scholarships allowed him to undertake university studies in Paris in

semiotics and Latin American cultural history. An eventual academic
position in the US provoked a first phase of political radicalization
in response to Chicano studies and racial conflicts in the 1970s. In
2000, the publication of Local Histories/Global Designs (Mignolo
2000) provided the initial conceptual framework for the ‘geopoli-
tics of knowledge’ that guides the coloniality/modernity research
programme, although his later essays and the contributions of other
group members have subsequently modified and radicalized the
project.
Consistent with the primacy given to the recovery of non-Euro-
pean sources of knowledge, Mignolo’s geopolitics of knowledge builds
on the work of the philosopher Enrique Dussel (1934-) and the soci-
ologist Anibal Quijano (1928-). Dussel is a well-known pioneer of
liberation philosophy who fled Argentina for Mexico in 1975, a turn-
ing point that led to a new reading of Marx and Levinas. The outcome
was a ‘philosophy of liberation’ based on the standpoint of the subal-
tern (Dussel 1998), a project that developed as part of a dialogue with
the Frankfurt critical theory tradition (Dussel 1995, 1996). Mignolo
uses Dussel’s liberation philosophy as an example of ‘decolonizing’
philosophy, although Dussel himself describes his method in terms
of deconstruction-reconstruction and transmodernity. Consequently,
a crucial question for the future of Latin American philosophy is the
conflict of interpretation over Dussel’s legacy — that is, over whether
it can be fully reconciled with the decolonial world-historical mis-
sion of ‘decolonization as an unfinished project’ (Maldonado-Torres
2011), despite its reliance on European thought, including its dialogi-
cal relation to Marx and the Frankfurt tradition.
The more decisive basis of Mignolo’s geopolitics of knowledge,
however, is the theory of the ‘coloniality of power’ developed by the
Peruvian sociologist Quijano. This point becomes evident in consid-
ering three of the key conceptual foundations of Mignolo’s synthesis,
which is both deconstructive and reconstructive: his use of Quijano’s
theory of the ‘coloniality of power’ as the basis for an epistemologi-
cal interpretation of the continuing and relatively unchanged effects
of colonialism; his own concept of ‘border thinking’ as a way of
describing the suppressed subaltern knowledges resulting from the
experience of ‘colonial difference’ and resistance to coloniality; and a
political strategy that gives primacy to epistemological ‘decoloniza-
tion’ as a process of ‘liberation’ (as opposed to Eurocentric notions of
‘emancipation’), to be realized through ‘de-linking’ and ‘epistemo-
logical disobedience’.
 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism  F  117

Quijano’s sociological theory of the ‘coloniality of power’ argues

that the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the 16th century
created a novel system of power and control based primarily on racial
classifications, but supplemented with gender and property classi-
fications and a system of labour control that even today constitutes
the ‘specific rationality’ of global power: ‘Eurocentrism’ (Quijano
2000: 523). It is important to note that the coloniality of power
argument is primarily an epistemic — and structuralist — thesis
about the continuing dominance of mental and cognitive structures
as the basis for explaining inequality in modernity. Quijano writes,

This relationship consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the

imagination of the dominated.... Coloniality, then, is still the most
general form of the domination in the world today, once colonialism
as an explicit political order was destroyed (1991: 170).

The second foundation of the decolonial approach is what Mignolo

adds to Quijano’s theory of the epistemic effects of coloniality: a
‘geopolitics of knowledge’ informed by Foucault’s understanding of
‘subjugated knowledges’, but redefined as ‘subaltern knowledges’.
The central concern is the ‘locus of enunciation’ of knowledge
claims, especially the colonizing use of European imperial ‘global
designs’ to subordinate ‘local histories’ (Mignolo 2000). Colonial
victims thus have subaltern standpoints based on ‘colonial differ-
ence’, a term that has epistemic implications but is also linked to the
traumatic effects of colonial ‘wounds’. The now influential concept
of ‘border thinking’ is used to describe colonial culture as a cultural
and epistemic ‘battlefield’ that cannot be understood adequately
in conventional notions of syncretism or hybridity. Consequently,
the modern world system is characterized by a marginalization of
the ‘subaltern knowledges’ arising from colonial difference. Such
border thinking has a ‘double voice’ because it is characterized by a
two-way translation across epistemic borders. This thesis is exem-
plified in a series of case studies of New World writers — American,
indigenous, Caribbean, Latin American — who express such ‘sub-
altern reason’.
A third central theme follows from the primacy given to colonial-
ity: liberation as epistemic decolonization through ‘de-linking’, a thesis
legitimated in part by a controversial reading of Franz Fanon (Mignolo
2007a). The argument, however, goes far beyond other discussions
of the ‘decentring’, ‘deparochialization’ or ‘deprovincialization’
118  f  Raymond Morrow

of European thought (Chakrabarty 2007; Costa 2006). Mignolo’s

understanding of ‘decolonization’ is based on the ambiguous impera-
tive of de-linking from the West:

It is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic, to ‘think’

from the canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is
critical of modernity. To do so means to reproduce the blind epistemic
ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible, any political
philosophy of inclusion (2002: 66).

To be sure, Mignolo equivocates in acknowledging that such a task

is ‘not impossible’, even if it is ‘difficult’. It is clearly ‘not impossible’
in Latin America, since Dussel’s liberation philosophy does build on
the critical canons of Western philosophy, despite extensive use of
local traditions. For Mignolo, delinking also requires an ‘alternative
to the social sciences’, rejecting Immanuel Wallerstein’s alternative
of their ‘opening’ as insufficient to overcome Eurocentrism: ‘I have
highlighted philosophy, but what I said about it applies to the social
sciences as well’ (ibid.: 73).
Some of the more problematic implications of the project are also
evident in the call within the project for integrating traditional and
modern knowledge:

I am referring to a world in which non-occidental systems of knowl-

edge can be incorporated into the curriculums of occidental univer-
sities on equal terms in areas like law, medicine, biology, economy
and philosophy. A world in which for example the Yoruba cosmovi-
sion, the Buddhist cosmovision of Zen, or the cosmovision of the
Cuna Indians, can serve to advance towards a more integral science
... (Castro-Gomez 2007: 444).

Whether Mignolo would embrace this statement as a whole is an

open question, but it is consistent with his call for a democrati-
zation of epistemology. Although such arguments were initially
developed in relation to Latin America, they were subsequently
generalized as part of a global geopolitics of knowledge. The pro-
ject is not modest about its claims: ‘The de-colonial turn refers to
a shift in knowledge production of similar nature and magnitude
to the linguistic and pragmatic turns’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007:
261). Similarly, Mignolo characterizes the American chicana les-
bian Anzaldua’s contributions as comparable to a Cartesian shift
 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism  F  119

of perspective (2005: 135). Further, a central member of the pro-

ject also insists that

just as one can speak of an (unfinished) project of modernity (J.

Habermas), so too can one speak of an (unfinished) project of decolo-
nization. These two projects are not entirely separable, since decolo-
nization itself can be seen as a ‘permanent process’ that ‘completes’
or subsumes and exhausts the emancipatory elements of modernity
(Maldonado-Torres 2011: 3).

Despite being a major influence on North American ‘Latin American

Studies’, Mignolo has received some severe criticism. For example,
literary theorists have questioned his use of Derrida and charged
him with arcadian romanticism (Michaelsen and Shershow 2007).
Marxist cultural theorists have criticized his idealism, culturalism
and abandonment of exploitation and class conflict (Read 2005:
82-83). The Brazilian critical sociologist Jose Mauricio Domingues
questions his ‘incredibly harsh commentary on Habermas’ views’
of democracy (Domingues 2009: 121) and rejects his ‘inversion’
of modernization theory, alleging that it is based on a reductionist
account of modernity as domination and implies that ‘only what is
not modern — or is at least in ambiguous relations with modernity
— is valuable in Latin America’ (ibid.: 114).
Philosophers have largely ignored decolonial theory, with the
exception of those with interests in Latin American philosophy, such
as the feminist philosopher Linda Alcoff. In a sympathetic article,
‘she questions’ his interpretations of hermeneutics, truth and iden-
tity, but nevertheless concludes that ‘we should consider seriously
Mignolo’s insistent claim in recent years that paradigms originating
in the West do not need to be “expanded” or “pluralized” but more
robustly transcended’ (Alcoff 2007: 91).
Eduardo Mendieta is another exception, describing the founda-
tions of his own ‘dialogical cosmopolitanism’ in terms of the three
public intellectuals he thinks provide the most responsible way to
carry on the Frankfurt critical theory tradition:

Dussel, thinker of the underside of globalization and modernity;

Habermas, the thinker of the enlightenment to come and power of
discursive-communicative reason at work in quotidian existence;
West, thinker of a political pragmatism that gives primacy to the
empowerment of society’s downtrodden (2007: 6-7).
120  f  Raymond Morrow

Mendieta’s synthetic stance is surprising in implicitly viewing

Habermas and Mignolo as broadly complementary, as he makes evi-
dent in his description of Mignolo as a valuable resource for a ‘critical
cosmopolitanism’ that links diversity and universalism as ‘diversal-
ity’ (ibid.: 11). But this reconciliation depends on a selective refer-
ence to Mignolo, ignoring the essays and chapters where he draws
upon a contentious reading of Fanon to legitimate a de-linking from
European modernity. In short, whereas Mendieta’s position can be
located as part of a decentring and pluralization of Western social
theory, Mignolo’s decolonial approach often suggests the need for a
‘robust transcendence’ of it, to use Alcoff’s phrase.
Although this is not the place for a detailed critique of Mignolo’s
project, other problems should be noted. First, the self-description
of decolonial theory as a ‘research program’ cannot be justified in
the social scientific sense, given the theory’s dogmatic reliance on
Quijano’s coloniality of power thesis. Second, the discussion of bor-
der thinking and decolonization fails to engage the existing literature
on indigenous knowledge. This has significant consequences, such as
ignoring the ‘darker side’ of both fragmented indigenous traditions and
‘border thinking’ (for example, the Maoist movement in Peru), as well
as failing to consider the research — strongly influenced by Habermas
and Freire — on many relatively successful examples of intercultural
dialogue on health, education and the environment (Morrow 2008,
2009). Third, whatever the merits of Mignolo’s decolonial analysis, it
applies primarily to zones with large and relatively autonomous indig-
enous populations. While suggesting that critiques of modernity origi-
nating in the West ‘cannot be valid for . . . those who are not white or
Christian’ (2002: 85-86), Mignolo does not confront the anomalies
arising from the facts that most black and indigenous people in Latin
America are Christian and that the remaining vast majority are ‘white’,
even as mestizos, most of whom deny their distant indigenous ancestry.
Consequently, decolonial theory cannot be usefully applied to Latin
America as a whole, which is why leading Latin American researchers,
such as Garcia Canclini, have focused on the national reproduction
of hegemony and the complex relations between globalization, cul-
ture industries, hybridity, and modernity (Garcia Canclini 1995). For
Mignolo, of course, this strategy suffers from the ‘Eurocentric’ influ-
ence of authors such as Gramsci and Bourdieu.
Finally, Mignolo makes a problematic call for ‘liberation from the
social sciences’, on the assumption that the social sciences in Latin
America remain imitative and Eurocentric. Nevertheless, he tellingly
fails to name or confront the leading contemporary Latin American
 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism  F  121

social researchers who are supposedly guilty of such a colonial men-

tality. This antipathy towards the social sciences is closely related to
a rejection of ‘development’ in any form as a Western imposition, a
stance related to post-development theory (Rahnema 1997). Mignolo
claims only sufficient knowledge of Latin America to make concrete
political recommendations, concluding that given the ‘impossibility’
of democracy in capitalism, the best alternative would be Andean
indigenous communalism, based on the principle that the economy
should administer scarcity rather than accumulation (2008: 55-57).
Mignolo’s utopian vision can be linked with what Victor Li calls
the aporia of ‘neo-primitivism’ that haunts much modern social
theory, which uses radical alterity as part of the redemption of the
Western self: ‘the primitive is valorized in order to save us, its radi-
cal heterogeneity all too predictably serving our desire for a way out
of modern civilization’ (Li 2006: 30, emphasis in original). Li gives
Habermas a central place as the most sophisticated effort to accom-
modate difference, while still defining modernity in opposition to
the pre-modern. Mignolo, on the other hand, appears to claim to
break out of this aporetic dilemma by privileging the non-Western
primitive as the ‘other’ within a ‘diversality’ that links diversity and
universalism through ‘another logic’ characteristic of ‘border think-
ing’. Yet Li would probably remain sceptical of this claim, especially
since the empirical primitive ‘other’ has largely disappeared, being
increasingly replaced by a spectral primitive ‘other’ constructed by
the human sciences and the global mass media.
So, what could Habermas learn from Mignolo and the decolonial
project? Mignolo’s preoccupation with coloniality does point to forms
of distorted communication and knowledge interests that have not
been adequately addressed. Nevertheless, despite the many valuable
insights of Mignolo’s understanding of border thinking and critical
cosmopolitanism, the resulting political call for radical decolonization
as de-linking is not very helpful in the Latin American context, and
distracts from a more multidimensional understanding of poverty,
the development of human capabilities and transformative change.
Consequently, a further opening up of Habermas’ theory to colo-
nial difference could benefit more from engagement with some of his
sympathetic critics (such as Seyla Benhabib and Thomas McCarthy),
as well as with the Latin American ‘postoccidental’ strategies of
Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and Eduardo Mendieta’s approach to
Latin American philosophy. Before turning to this concluding theme,
however, it is necessary to provide an overview of Habermas’ under-
standing of ‘multiple modernities’.
122  f  Raymond Morrow

Habermas on Modernity
The decolonial camp charges Habermas’ theory of modernity with
Eurocentrism on the grounds that it ‘is not sufficiently radical to
exorcize a coloniality which remains invisible to him. Habermas
does not realize that modernity is based on a massive epistemological
project of bad faith, to which he himself falls victim’ (Maldonado-
Torres 2011: 10). Such charges can be given a superficial plausibility
by recalling his comments in an interview of more than two decades
ago regarding whether his theory provided ‘lessons’ for the Third
World: ‘I am tempted to say “no” ... I am aware of the fact that this
is a eurocentrically limited view. I would rather pass the question’
(Dews 1992: 183). Although implicitly admitting a sin of omission,
‘tempted to say “no”’ suggests that he was not taking a paternalistic
stance. More important, however, is whether his account of moder-
nity is open to such questions, even if it rejects the totalizing and
reductionist concept of ‘coloniality’.
To confront the widespread prejudices regarding Habermas’ con-
ception of modernity, it is necessary to consider several of its neglected
features: (a) a non-teleological understanding of moral universalism;
(b) a concern with the ‘pathologies of modernity’; (c) an awareness of
‘multiple modernities’; (d) the recognition of the diversity of ‘forms
of life’ that mediate the use of procedural reason; and (e) a sensitivity
to the contradictory character of Western human rights discourses as
potentially both repressive and emancipatory. I will consider these
points in turn.
Habermas’ references to an ‘unfinished project’ of modernity may
suggest that he has in mind a teleological unfolding of Enlightenment
modernization processes. But in fact, he argues that ‘moral universal-
ism is a historical result . . . not something that can safely be left to
Hegel’s absolute spirit. Rather, it is chiefly a function of collective
efforts and sacrifices made by sociopolitical movements’ (1990: 170).
Misreadings of Habermas’ defence of modernity also reflect a fail-
ure to appreciate his complex theory of rationalization. Habermas’
qualified defence of aspects of modernity is two-edged: as part of the
Frankfurt School tradition, he is also acutely aware of the pathologies of
modernity. His account thus differentiates between two parallel pro-
cesses in modernity: the ‘instrumental rationalization’ characteristic of
science and technology as a form of control, as opposed to the ‘social
rationalization’ which is directed towards organizing communicative
relations around values. Consequently, the historical modernization
process has been highly ‘selective’ in its use of technical rationality,
 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism  F  123

given the potential of market forces and administrative power for the
‘colonization of the life- world’ (Habermas 1987). The use of the term
‘colonization’ here, however, should not be confused with its use in
decolonial theory, where the focus is on the very different question of
the primacy of epistemic colonization on the part of European thought.
Third, the selectivity and cross-cultural variations in ‘moderniza-
tion’ lead Habermas to embrace Eisenstadt’s conception of ‘multi-
ple modernities’: ‘The West is one participant among others, and all
participants must be willing to be enlightened by others about their
respective blind spots’ (Mendieta 2010: 1).
A fourth problem is that those who criticize the formalism and
proceduralism of Habermas’ approach as a form of abstract univer-
salism generally neglect his simultaneous insistence on the diversity of
‘forms of life’ (McCarthy 1999: 18). Such misleading interpretations
fail to take into account his distinction between universalizing ‘moral’
arguments and contextual ‘ethical’ ones (related to Hegel’s Sittlichkeit)
grounded in cultural diversity. Such issues first received widespread
attention in Habermas’ debate with Charles Taylor on the ‘politics of
recognition’ and subsequent writings on ‘inclusion’ (Habermas 1998).
Similarly, Eduardo Mendieta concludes that ‘one may argue then that
procedural reason is post-Eurocentric or anti-ethnocentric, and in this
way seeks a dialogue not just among the disciplines and sciences, but
also among cultures and traditions’ (2003a: 135).
A final question relates to the colonizing uses of Western rights
discourses. The decolonial project reduces modernity to such patho-
logical possibilities, whereas Habermas also considers emancipatory
potentials:
This normative idea of equal respect for everyone was developed
in Europe, but it does not follow that it is merely a narrow-minded
expression of European culture and Europe’s will to assert itself.
Human rights also depend on the reflexivity that enables us to step
back from our own tradition and learn to understand others from
their point of view . . . That of course does not mean that Europeans
and Americans do not need members of Arabic, Asiatic, or African
cultures to enlighten them concerning the blind spots of their
potentially selective ways of reading the meaning of human rights
(1997: 82).

Opening Habermas: The Postoccidental Option

Although Habermas has written only in more general terms about
the need for cross-civilizational learning, various resources are now
124  f  Raymond Morrow

available for ‘opening’ Habermas with respect to such issues. On

the one hand, there are important contributions from authors
close to Habermas. For example, Benhabib (2002) has attempted
to rework his universalistic moral theory to make it less vulner-
able to charges of ethnocentrism. And McCarthy’s recent Race,
Empire and the Idea of Human Development analyses the complicity of
European thought in racism and colonialism as part of an immanent
critique that fleshes out the social justice implications of Habermas’
concern with the ‘unfinished project’ of modernity in peripheral and
non-Western contexts as part of a ‘critical theory of development’
(McCarthy 2009).
On the other hand, there are forms of what Mendieta has called
‘postoccidentalist’ critical theory that do not succumb to the reduc-
tionism of Mignolo’s one-dimensional decolonial version, even
though they do speak in terms of critique ‘from within’ where ‘the
other speaks and responds back’ (2007: 93). For example, educa-
tional philosopher Paulo Freire has long been recognized as a postco-
lonial thinker (Giroux 1993), even though he cannot be incorporated
directly into the decolonial project, as noted with regret by a deco-
lonial researcher (Walsh 2009). Furthermore, Freire’s intersubjec-
tive understanding of knowledge and dialogue can be interpreted as
having remarkable affinities with Habermas’ theory of communica-
tive action (Morrow and Torres 2002). Similarly, while Mendieta is
appreciative of Mignolo’s concepts of critical cosmopolitanism and
border thinking, he tactfully ignores the ambiguous rhetoric of decol-
onization as de-linking, which opens the way for his own effort to
synthesize Dussel, Habermas and West as part of a ‘postoccidental-
ist’ option in critical theory. The crucial challenge for Mendieta — to
preserve his relation to Habermas and West — will be to respond
to the contentious decolonial thesis that Dussel’s liberation philoso-
phy and conception of transmoder- nity ‘acquires its proper meaning’
only as the ‘unfinished project of decolonization’ (Maldonado-Torres
2011: 3).
A crucial limitation of Mignolo’s decolonial approach is that it
tends to reduce liberation to a single dimension — decolonization as
de-linking — at the expense of a more multidimensional account of
power, domination and emancipation. Instead of a search for ‘alter-
natives to philosophy and the social sciences’, Habermas’ focus is
on their continued reflexive, postpositivist transformation. In other
words, an intercultural opening up and autonomous local appropri-
ation are part of the same process. This stance does not preclude
 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism  F  125

the necessity of situated decolonizing practices, such as bi-cultural

indigenous education, intercultural learning and greater intercul-
tural reflexivity in research. But it shifts the focus from decolonial
denunciation to the more open-ended goals of autonomy, mutual
recognition, empowerment, deliberative democracy and dialogical
collective learning. In other words, the opening up of the human
sciences implies a gesture of global solidarity, an invitation for non-
European standpoints and perspectives to take responsibility for
constructing localized traditions of philosophy and social science as
part of a complex process of creative appropriation and democra-
tizing access to knowledge. An excellent example is evident in the
‘knowledge democracy movement’ in the international Freirean
network. The point of departure is a simple question: ‘Have we in
the creation of formal academic structures of knowledge production
created both an extraordinary body of scientific knowledge that has
benefited large parts of humanity, but also constrained the flow of
knowledge excluding many from recognition as producers of knowl-
edge?’ (Hall 2011: 12). So what is required is not a ‘de-linking’ from
modern knowledge, but re-linking it in multiple ways in a ‘Knowledge
Commons’, as part of a dialogue with those most in need of trans-
formative knowledge.
Freedom requires not only autonomy, but also meeting modernity
‘halfway’ with the critical literacy that empowers ‘border thinking’
of diverse types beyond the limitations of oral culture. As Habermas
has noted, ‘any universalistic morality is dependent upon a form of
life that meets it halfway’, in the form of a ‘modicum of congru-
ent’ practices of socialization and education that facilitate abstract,
flexible ego identities and complementary, responsive institutions
(1990: 207). Such indigenous subjects who meet modernity ‘half-
way’ — particularly indigenous intellectuals — have been insightfully
analysed in Peru by anthropologist Marisol De la Cadena (2005) as
‘indigenous mestizos’. In other words, when socialization processes
create hybrid subjects with such capacities, ethical reflection and
the reconstruction of communities cannot ignore dialogue with uni-
versal questions, as is vividly evident in the Andean, Zapatista and
other autonomy movements. So, the question is not that of deciding
between ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’ democracy, but of the possibility
of rethinking both in terms of the ‘tribal’ dimensions of ‘intercultural
public spheres’ (James 1999).


126  f  Raymond Morrow

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6
Care, Power and Deconstructive
Postcolonialism
Reformulating the Habermasian Response
Richard Ganis

T he discourse-ethical programme of Jürgen Habermas stands

accused of a fundamental structural failing — namely, its supposed
incapacity to attend to the irreducible epistemic incongruities that
reside at the core of all self-other relations. To certain thinkers,
this deficit renders Habermas’ model conceptually impoverished
and anachronistic, a relic of the long since discredited social scien-
tific imaginary of Enlightenment modernity. In this chapter, I will
gather some of these critical perspectives under the loose rubric of
‘deconstructive postcolonialism’ (DP). Taking important theoretical
cues from both Derridean hospitality ethics and Foucauldian geneal-
ogy, the DP tradition has endeavoured to disarticulate the attitude
of dedifferentiating mastery that it detects at the structural core of
Habermas’ framework. Its aim in doing so is to disfigure the tex-
tual field as a matrix of interstitial sites — discursive spaces that
allow the internal frames of reference of the ‘postcolonial other’ to
live unpredictably and multiply, unmoored from the communicative
idealizations and orientation towards universalistic problem-solving
that delimit Habermas’ intrinsically logo-, andro- and Eurocentric
perspective. I begin the chapter with a brief overview of DP’s critical
break with Habermas, showing how DP has valorized the asymmetri-
cal attitude of ‘care’ for the irreducible alterity of the other over and
against the impartial, universalistic moral standpoint of discourse
ethics. This is followed by a consideration of Habermas’ own, rather
unsatisfactory, response to Derridean deconstruction.
I then set forth a qualified defence of Habermas’ prioritization
of the context-transcending norms of ideal role-taking, universaliz-
ability and symmetrical reversibility of perspectives, along with his

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-9
 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism  F  131

broader, corollary conception of world cosmopolitanism. To this end,

I invite Habermas to lean on Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, so
that he may understand the asymmetrical gesture of care as ‘concep-
tually and genetically prior’ to detached modes of cognition within
the sphere of social integration. Doing so, I argue, would furnish
Habermas with much-needed conceptual resources, tools that would
bolster his arguments against the ‘contextualist’ and ‘relativist’ impli-
cations of DP’s care-ethical orientation. Such an appropriation of the
Honnethian account of care would also better position Habermas to
counter DP’s charge that, in prioritizing decidedly cognitivist pro-
cedures of moral disputation, discourse ethics remains structurally
and inescapably suffused with the totalizing epistemological and
political ambitions of colonialist governmentality. While I suggest
that an encounter between Habermas and Honneth would be highly
advantageous on this level, I also maintain that Habermas is correct
to demur from the moral monism of Honneth’s approach, which —
no less than DP — gives rise to the prospect of a phenomenology of
recognitional experience pervading all spheres of life. Leery of this
outcome, the chapter argues in favour of retaining the Habermasian
distinction between social integration and system integration.

Deconstructive Postcolonialism Contra Habermas

Stimulated by an appetite for fresh ideas and a rejection of the legiti-
macy and relevance of conceptual systems as systems, the 1960s gave
rise to a number of innovative social-scientific movements. By the
1980s, these movements had coalesced into what might be called a
‘postparadigmatic’ shift (Ortner 1994). This turn — apparent espe-
cially in the field of anthropology — proved attractive to many think-
ers because it acknowledged and redressed the limitations of research
agendas grounded in the insular authority of ‘grand theories’ (Marcus
and Fischer 1986: 9). As we shall see, Habermas’ discourse theory
has been construed as an instance of the latter, given its alleged struc-
tural devaluation of all that is situated beyond the public use of rea-
son, beyond the identitarian space of giving and receiving meanings
that have been made commensurable with one another. More open-
ended and alive to a multiplicity of interpretations, postparadigmatic
approaches offer ‘a sophisticated epistemology that takes full account
of intractable contradiction, paradox, irony, and uncertainty in the
explanation of human activities’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 15).
Indeed, in breaking with the positivist view of the field as a dehis-
toricized terrain of operationalizable variables, postparadigmatic
132  f  Richard Ganis

researchers seek to foreground a historically constrained, decentred

and ‘decolonialized’ kind of anthropological knowledge and subject.
Unlike classical fieldwork, such a vantage point is not circumscribed
by the disinterested pursuit of universal, humanistic truths. Rather,
the researcher is enjoined to pursue specific political aims in alli-
ance with communities and groups situated within shifting social and
cultural locations. Thus criticism of hegemonic political, economic
and cultural arrangements becomes linked inextricably with social-
scientific practice.
While in some respects sympathetic to these methodological
shifts, deconstructive postcolonialism has gone beyond such inter-
ventions, attempting something like a radical unmaking of the mod-
ern ‘Western’ ratio. This effort is marked by a refusal of the ‘terror’ of
theory and an associated criticism of the concept of truth as a matter
of correspondence to reality. According to this concept, the truth
value of a proposition is determined by its correspondence to things
as they are, independent of human desires and decisions. Whether it
is the Platonic Forms, the Kantian thing-in-itself, Newtonian math-
ematics, or Habermas’ ‘principle (U)’, some sort of universal, trans-
discursive ground is posited against which the veracity of human
judgements (moral-ethical, aesthetic, empirical, and so on) can be
ascertained. Indeed, the correspondence concept of truth anchors the
very structure of being and language in the homologous relationship
between object and referent, in the association between things and
cognate words and concepts.
In sharp contrast, the tradition of DP aims to dissolve the foun-
dationalism of ultimate groundings — the chain linking subject, rep-
resentation, sign, and truth — and the attendant view of the self as
unitary, knowable, autonomous, and self-legislating. To this end, it
draws heavily upon the tradition of French poststructural- ism, whose
progenitors include (according to some, at least) Michel Foucault.1
DP is indebted to Foucault for a number of interventions, not least
his portrayal of the unity of any given discourse as a dispersion of ele-
ments: systems of discontinuity, in his view, are the latent reality of
every discursive statement. This being the case, Foucault calls for a
type of discursive analysis capable of interrogating the rules, or ‘dis-
cursive regularities’, that undergird the disunity of ‘objects, forms,

1 
While Foucault famously refused the label ‘poststructuralist’, the
term has been used widely, for better or worse, to characterize the philo-
sophical trajectory of his work.
 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism  F  133

concepts, and theoretical options’ of a discourse (Scott 2006: 312; see

also 313). In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), he depicts these
rules and principles not as interior to a discursive formation, but
rather as accounting for its limits. In fact, since it amounts to a group
of statements defined by specific conditions of existence, a discourse
must be understood as an ‘archive’ — that is, as a system govern-
ing the formation and transformation of historical statements within
a society, culture or civilization. For Foucault, archival description
does not seek to uncover the processes through which ideas are
formed, the intentions of speaking subjects or an essentialized sub-
stratum of meanings. When we approach archives genealogically, we
position them to exert a differentiating, rather than a homogenizing,
effect upon our comprehension of discursive statements. Indeed, in
loosing discourses from their moorings in transcendental metanarra-
tives and their ratiocinative epistemologies, Foucault’s genealogical
method shifts attention to the intractable disjunctures, equivocations
and uncertainties that arise in the explanation of human activities.
‘Genealogy’, as Nancy Fraser notes,

takes it as axiomatic that everything is interpretation all the way

down, or to put it less figuratively, that cultural practices are insti-
tuted historically and are therefore contingent, ungrounded except
in terms of other prior, contingent, historically instituted practices
(1989: 19).

The imprint of Foucault on DP has been significant and wide- reach-

ing. For instance, the work of Homi Bhabha, one of the DP tradition’s
leading figures, is animated by a number of Foucauldian interventions.
Noteworthy in the present context is Foucault’s effort to forge an ‘ago-
nistic temporal break’ between the cultural symbol and the cultural
sign. Here, Foucault’s idea is to unanchor signifier and signified from
all conceptual, structural and spatio- temporal stabilizations, re-pre-
senting them as a constantly sliding, shifting and circulating matrix
of cultural meanings. To Bhabha, Foucault’s agonistic disjuncture has
profound implications for postcolonial historiography and criticism:
we can appeal to it to interrupt the ‘fixity’ of the ideological construc-
tion of otherness; challenge deterministic and functionalist models of
framing the relation between discourse and politics; and disrupt the
occidental stereotomy of inside/outside, space/time binaries (Bhabha
1994: 66–67, 186). Indeed, Foucault’s manoeuvre positions us to
speak and act outside the sentence, as it were, and explode the tran-
scendental grand narratives of 19th-century humanist historicism
134  f  Richard Ganis

— evolutionism, utilitarianism, evangelism, and so forth — upon

which the technologies of colonial and imperialist governance were
founded. Situated within the radical liminality of the ‘enunciative
present’, we can move ‘beyond theory’ and create discursive room
for ‘new forms of identification that may confuse the continuity of
historical temporalities, confound the ordering of cultural symbols,
traumatize tradition’ (ibid.: 179). While an encounter with the ‘post-
colonial symptom’ is in this sense extractable from Foucault’s text,
Bhabha cautions that Foucault’s relationship to postcolonial criti-
cism remains elliptic, insofar as he fails to envisage the colonial text
from the ‘transferential’ perspective — that is, from the moment at
which the Western ratio returns to itself from the ‘time-lag’ of the
colonial relation. Only from this contingent vantage point do we see
how modernity and postmodernity are themselves constructed from
the marginal position of cultural difference. As Bhabha puts it, ‘[b]y
disavowing the colonial moment as an enunciative present in the his-
torical and epistemological condition of Western modernity, Foucault
can say little about the transferential relation between the West and
its colonial history’ (ibid.: 196).
An associated ensemble of concerns animates the DP of Gayatri
Spivak. However, in her work it is the figure of Derrida, rather than
that of Foucault, that casts the longer shadow. Of particular inter-
est in the present context is Spivak’s engagement with Derridean
hospitality ethics. From the latter perspective, the gesture of univer-
sal hospitality — defended, most conspicuously, in Kant’s ‘Toward
Perpetual Peace’ — is no longer construed as conditional (a sym-
metrical circuit of contracts and exchange between arrivant and rev-
enant), but rather as unconditional. Pace Kant, Derrida transfigures
the frontiers between place of arrival and place of departure, such
that hospitality becomes a kind of ‘teleopoiesis’, an unqualified open-
ing to the other ‘who is neither expected nor invited, ... [who] arrives
as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and
unforeseeable, in short, wholly other’ (Derrida 2003: 128–29). On
this move, Kant’s reciprocative ideal of invitation is transposed into
the deconstructive concept of visitation. Here, leaning on Emmanuel
Levinas, Derrida’s idea is to forge an ethics of care capable of touch-
ing the non-repeatable example of the distant other at the level of
both ethics and politics.
Of course, Kant would have little choice but to abjure such a
conception, given his insistence that the unilateral attitude of care
cannot be made cohabitable with the public use of reason and its
cognate principles of tolerative reciprocity. Spivak’s reception of
 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism  F  135

the Derridean gesture of unreserved hospitality is much warmer.

However, she is keen to ratchet up its ethico-political implications,
so that the offer of hospitality can better subvert the foundationalist
frameworks of epistemology, metaphysics and history that have fore-
closed, rather than authorized, the unanticipated and unanticipatable
narratives of the postcolonial subaltern.2 Among the categories she
appeals to in this context is the idea of catachresis. Indeterminate and
infinitely mutable, catachresis is for Spivak an avenue through which
the subaltern can wrest words and concepts from their prescribed
meanings, depriving them of their normative referents and extir-
pating their sedimented background assumptions. The catachrestic
gesture is in this sense both existential and political, involving a dis-
tancing both from oneself and from ‘some kind of inchoate speaking
as such’ (Spivak and Gunew 1993: 194–95). Such manoeuvres help
Spivak to elaborate a postcolonial politics of care that at once reso-
nates with and moves beyond Derrida’s unreserved visitation with
the other. Its aim is to decentre the objectivating gaze of the social
scientist as empirical clinician and diagnostician; emphasize a mul-
tiplicity of epistemological processes that persistently problematize
what is being asserted as fact; and ultimately recast ethnography as
an ethico-political opening towards the irreducible otherness of sub-
alternities residing within the shifting interstices of the postcolonial
‘margin’. 3

2 
Included in this indictment is Marx’s ‘dialectics of externalization
followed by fetish formation’, which is criticized for occluding a more
complex, fragmentary and polyphonic understanding of categories such
as gender and race (Spivak 1988a: 80). Likewise, the ‘dark presence of
the Third World’ is sublated in the universalistic idioms of Marx’s histor-
icism, which imbricates the question of ‘value’ within an overdetermined
materialist predication of a unitary proletarian subject (ibid.: 166).
3 
In a similar vein, Edward Said (1993) counsels us to read the cultural
archive as a polyphonic, rather than univocal, accompaniment to the
expansionist organizing directives of Orientalism. Said’s ‘contrapuntal’
perspective is influenced by Gramsci’s effort to rethink the problem of
the reproduction of existing relations of power through the category of
consent, rather than that of force, as well as Foucault’s insistence upon
the impossibility of stepping outside a discursive episteme through an
act of will or consciousness. DP critics like Bhabha (1994: 71–74) and
Dennis Porter (1994) have underscored the limitations of Said’s uneasy
conceptual alliance. They note that Said is never quite able to convey, as
Gramsci does, a sense of hegemony as a process arising out of concrete
136  f  Richard Ganis

Deconstructive Postcolonialism in
Habermasian Perspective
In calling for a persistent undoing of a Western social-scientific
imaginary anchored in the epistemology of correspondence,
humanist historicism, the metaphysics of presence, and the foun-
dationalism of ultimate groundings, frameworks of deconstructive
postcolonialism have made a number of notable interventions. They
have counselled us to interrogate power in its non-institutional
forms; to reflect on the ways in which relations of domination and
desire are imbricated within the fabric of the self; and to disfig-
ure totalized, logophilic conceptions of categories such as gender,
sexuality, biology, and nature, so that they might be recovered and
explored as ‘aspects of societies that have been suppressed, unar-
ticulated, or denied’ (Flax 1990: 20).
From the perspective of DP, it would seem that Jürgen Habermas’
rationalist communications model does little more than immortalize
the logocentric gaze as a basic organizing principle of human socia-
tion. While Habermas has not engaged with DP to any significant
extent, it would not be difficult to imagine his likely reception of
this tradition, given his vocal and decidedly critical treatment of its
key philosophical influences, particularly French poststructuralism.
In this regard, Habermas has directed much of his polemical thunder
at Derrida, who is indicted for subjecting the impartialist procedures
of universal will-formation to the aporias of the undecidable deci-
sion. For Habermas, this move is made at the cost of depreciating
the illocutionary force of argument aimed at reaching mutual under-
standing, which in turn leads deconstruction into a number of philo-
sophical and ethico-political culs-de-sac — notably, contextualism,
perspectivism, decisionism, and ‘bad’ historicism and aestheticism.
Habermas’ complaint against Derrida — presented in two
1985 essays, ‘Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins’ and
‘Excursus on Levelling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy

sociohistorical conjunctures and configurations. At the same time, he

neglects to fully appreciate, as Foucault does, the degree to which various
historical periods are discursively differentiated. Said thus falls readily
into the trap of essentialism: he depicts conflicts within the postcolonial
margin as struggles between powerless and powerful groups, rather than
conceiving of them as manifold and interrelational, shot through with
uncertainty, paradoxes and deteleologized normative horizons.
 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism  F  137

and Literature’ (1990b), and never quite abandoned — rests on the

contention that deconstruction is poorly situated to carry forth its
critique of the pathological undercurrents of late modernity (the
instrumental-technical rationalization of everyday life, xenophobia,
sexism, racism, anti-semitism, and so forth), since it at the same
time uproots and radically disfigures the normative resources and
rationalist criteria of defensibility that are necessary for fruitful
moral disputation and social critique. Indeed, as Habermas sees it,
deconstruction remains caught in a ‘performative double bind’: its
valorization of the ‘poetic’ or ‘impaired’ dimension of speech entails
a coextensive devaluation of the procedures of universal will-forma-
tion to which interlocutors must appeal in order to arrive at rational,
unforced agreements about competing validity claims and value-ori-
entations. By construing the ‘otherness of the other’ as irreducibly
inscrutable and heterogeneous to knowledge, deconstruction does
little more than release dialogic subjects from the injunction to solve
moral problems publicly, communicatively and rationally — that is,
from the obligation to offer and accept meanings on free and equal
terms. In a word, in blurring the ‘genre distinction’ between philos-
ophy and literature, Derrida’s approach deprives intersubjective dis-
course — indeed, philosophy itself — of its ‘seriousness’, sacrificing
it to the vicissitudes of an aestheticism ‘gone wild’. When ‘thought
can no longer operate in the realms of truth and validity claims’,
Habermas argues, the meaning and relevance of social analysis and
criticism is surrendered to the vagaries of ‘taste, the “Yes” and “No”
of the palate’. Because it allows the latter to emerge, a la Nietzsche,
‘as the sole organ of knowledge beyond Truth and Falsity, beyond
Good and Evil’, deconstruction remains ensconced in the very tran-
scendentalism and philosophy of subjectivity that it seeks to desta-
bilize (Habermas 1982: 25).
Highly bewildered by such claims, Derrida was quick to reproach
Habermas for displaying little, if any, hermeneutic appreciation of
the principal motivations and aims of his work. His response to the
charge that deconstruction has inveighed against the propriety of
rational public discussion and debate echoes a well-known riposte
by Foucault, who faced similar criticisms from Habermas. ‘[I]t is
extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy and should
be eliminated’, Foucault stressed, but ‘it is just as dangerous to say
that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into
irrationality’ (1993: 165). Likewise, the claim that deconstruction
is mired in performative contradictions, moral-ethical prevarications
and ‘anything goes’ perspectivism proves facile. Derrida knows full
138  f  Richard Ganis

well that universalistic criteria of moral judgement cannot simply be

cast aside and forgotten: subjecting the ‘decision’ to the ordeal of
‘undecidability’ rests not upon a repudiation of the former, but rather
on an appeal to it. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere, Derrida aims

not to eviscerate the topos of Enlightenment rationality tout court

but to forge a reckoning between its calibrative ideals and the per-
spective of the incalculably singular, from which standpoint the
deconstructive ethics of radical difference takes its moral bearings
(Ganis 2011: 16).

Habermas’ criticisms of Derrida’s care-ethical perspective are in

this respect rather artless — especially in light of the efforts that
Habermas himself has made to envisage the asymmetrical orienta-
tion of care as in some sense cohabitable with the normative frame-
work of moral argumentation. Moving against the grain of his earlier
insistence upon a fairly strict schism between the ‘feeling-neutral’
standpoint of justice and the one-sided orientation of affective sym-
pathy for the other’s existential welfare, Habermas has argued over
the past few decades that moral norms cannot be successfully adju-
dicated ‘without empathetic sensitivity by each person to everyone
else’: a ‘mature capacity for moral judgment’ requires the ‘integra-
tion of cognitive operations and emotional dispositions and attitudes’
(Habermas 1990a: 202, 182). Put more emphatically, ‘every legal
community and every democratic process for actualizing basic rights
is inevitably permeated by ethics’ (Habermas 1994: 126).
In positioning ethical goods and value-orientations as vital sources
of ‘nourishment’ for the justification procedures of the discourse
ethic’s universalization test (‘principle U’), Habermas has been read
by some as initiating a significant break with his erstwhile insistence
upon preserving the ‘razor-sharp cuts’ between non-universalizable
evaluative claims and the symmetrical conditionality that delimits
public discourses of norm justification (Habermas 1990a: 104).4

4 
William Rehg’s argument in Insight and Solidarity is significant in
this regard. According to Rehg, the homologous relationship between
Habermasian morality and the ethics of care is apparent when we con-
sider the problem of ‘application’. Doing discourse ethics, Rehg argues,
means according due sensitivity to ‘situational particulars, especially
those pertaining to the “weal and woe” of other persons’; whenever we
apply a universal moral norm in a concrete situation, we are ‘potentially
 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism  F  139

Habermas’ effort to retain a ‘remnant of the good at the core of

the right’ raises the question of whether the cognitivist standpoint
of moral disputation is no longer ascendant in his model, inasmuch
as it has been allowed to fraternize, as it were, with the one-sided,
affective attitude of care for the incommensurably different other
(Habermas 1998: 29).
One would be mistaken to answer in the affirmative, in my view.
However much Habermas may wish to affiliate partialistic needs,
affects and goods with the detached, cognitive procedures necessary
for arriving at universally binding moral norms, he can deny the cate-
gorical primacy of the latter standpoint only at the risk of summoning
forth the spectre of relativist prevarication, and thereby undermining
one of the principal politico-philosophical aims of his discourse-eth-
ical framework. Indeed, the more one blurs the line between evalua-
tive claims and normative ones, the more morality is associated with
the non-universalizable perspectives of ethical life, the more the con-
cept of liberal-democratic justice becomes, as Sharon Krause notes,
‘controversial in precisely the way Habermas seeks to avoid’ (2005:
380).
As a result, Habermas has little choice but to keep the unilateral
orientation of care at an express conceptual remove from principle
(U), which recognizes a controversial norm as valid and rationally
conceived if, and only if, dialogic subjects have agreed that its gen-
eralized observance comports with the interests of each individual
(1990a: 65). In prioritizing (U)’s conditions of symmetrical reciproc-
ity, Habermasian morality must remand the viewpoints and concerns
of particular communities of value to the heading of the ‘ethical’,
which is therewith distinguished categorically from the perspective
of generalized justice. Indeed, only upon purging itself of the asym-
metricality of the former can discourse ethics ‘authorize the uni-
versal norms that justice entails’ (Habermas 1998: 26). This is so
even with respect to ‘solidarity’, a category that Habermas situates
somewhere between the thoroughgoing universalism of the justice
perspective and the thoroughgoing uni-laterality of the care stand-
point. On the one hand, Habermasian solidarity resonates with the
gesture of care insofar as it is animated by affectivity and felt concern
for the welfare of the other. On the other hand, solidarity remains
distinct from care, entailing a situation in which each self attends

open to the whole gamut of considerations raised in the ethics of care’

(1994: 11, 208).
140  f  Richard Ganis

reciprocally to the welfare of the other, absent any privileging of par-

ticular needs, definitional identities or conceptions of the good (see
Habermas 1991).
From the vantage point of DP, then, it would appear that whatever
his recent theoretical concessions and reconstructions, Habermas
remains culpable of enfolding the unanticipatable, non-repeatable
perspectives and positionalities of the postcolonial other within
the reciprocative, Western-centric logos of contracts and exchange,
thereby subjecting them to epistemic effacement and disqualifica-
tion. Indeed, there would seem to be little room for rapprochement
between DP and Habermas, inasmuch as discourse ethics must pri-
oritize the symmetrical, feeling-neutral procedures of norm justifica-
tion at the level of theoretical categorization.
I agree with this assessment, but side with Habermas in insist-
ing that the equalitarian reciprocity of the justice perspective must
be positioned as a constraint against particularistic viewpoints and
conceptions of the good that would seek to commandeer the field
of moral discourse and claim it as their own. Indeed, only by mak-
ing moral universalism the ascendant standpoint of discourse ethics
can Habermas secure the normative framework he needs to mount
his broader defence of the Kantian ideal of toleration and cosmopoli-
tan conventions amongst modern nation-states. Nonetheless, some
conceptual resources must be extended to Habermas, so that he can
better confront accusations — from DP and other quarters — that
his framework amounts to little more than a cognitivist technology
imbued with the totalizing political and epistemological aspirations
of colonialist governmentality.

The Dialectic of Care and Justice

One theoretical avenue that can be mined profitably in this con-
text is the recognition model set forth by Axel Honneth. Honneth
shifts the terrain of the discourse-ethical perspective notably, even
as he remains sympathetic to the tradition of left-Hegelian intersub-
jectivism in which Habermas operates. His basic idea is to theorize
relations of care and affective attachment as ‘conceptually and geneti-
cally antecedent’ to the feeling-neutral standpoint of moral cogni-
tion. Because he draws the boundary between detached observation
and recognitional care too sharply, contends Honneth, Habermas
neglects to take sufficient account of the fact that all efforts of intel-
ligent problem-solving are marked by a prior standpoint of caring rec-
ognition that has become, in effect, ‘neutralized’. What gets eclipsed
 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism  F  141

in Habermas’ theory is the fact that moral argumentation originates

in, and is dependent upon, ‘an element of affective disposition, even
of positive predisposition, which is not appropriately expressed by
the notion that subjects always seek to understand each other’s rea-
sons for acting’ (Honneth 2008: 35).
In this respect, Honneth appears to be far more accommodative
than Habermas of DP’s plea for a de-cognitivized encounter with the
other. In Honneth’s framework, logos, whose dominative mastery DP
seeks to dethrone, is in a sense humbled and forced to reckon with the
attitude of affective, non-ratiocinative felt concern that precedes the
standpoint of deliberative justice and makes it possible. Habermas may
well insist that all moral discourses are ultimately ‘permeated by ethics’,
but Honneth provides us with a sophisticated, well-elaborated account
of why the feeling-neutral standpoint of liberal democratic justice is
predicated upon a prior attitude of caring recognition. In effect, he
situates the conceptual and genetic aetiology of justice ‘beyond’ theory
and knowledge, or, as DP authors like Bhabha and Spivak would have
it, beyond the homogenist gaze of Galilean epistemology and human-
ist historiography. Yet, because he too remains a moral universalist,
Honneth can follow Habermas in subordinating non-universalizable,
non- reciprocative relations of concern for the other’s welfare to princi-
ples of equal and impartial treatment. He writes,

[T]he moment the other person is recognized as an equal being among

others — in that he or she is capable of participating in practical dis-
courses — the unilateral relation of care must come to an end, for an
attitude of benevolence is not permissible toward subjects who are able
to articulate their views and beliefs publicly (Honneth 2007: 124).

Honneth’s conceptualization of care is an important addendum to

Habermas, in that it enables us to better appreciate why moral dis-
course involves more than just an appeal to dialogical reasonableness,
and thereby better protect it against the prospects of ‘banalization’
and ‘joyless reformism’ against which Habermas too seeks to guard
(Habermas 1983: 158). Indeed, were he to draw on Honneth’s per-
spective, Habermas would be better situated to rebuff DP’s styliza-
tion of discourse ethics as little more than another transcendentalized
mise-en-scène inhabited by intrinsically affectless, disembodied, rati-
ocinative Kantian men.
However, there is a potential danger in Honneth’s approach. In
making his case for the conceptual and genetic priority of the recog-
nitional standpoint, Honneth’s plea is for a ‘moral monism’ wherein
142  f  Richard Ganis

the Habermasian distinction between social integration and sys-

tem integration is effectively dissolved. According to the analysis
worked out in The Theory of Communication Action and other texts,
Habermas sees action in the economic and political ‘subsystems’ of
modern complex societies as in large measure steered and coordi-
nated by the ‘delinguistified’ media of money and power, without
reference to the existential needs, motivations and normative claims
of the actors involved. Honneth breaks with this view, situating rec-
ognitional normativity at the conceptual and genetic core of both of
these domains. In so doing, he has been accused — by Nancy Fraser,
for one — of participating in a broader ‘cultural turn’ in critical the-
ory (see Fraser and Honneth 2003: 211–22). To Fraser, a principal
deficit of this turn is its tendency to underplay the significance of
phenomena such as political power and the capitalist profit motive,
by conceiving and analysing these phenomena from the vantage point
of cultural recognition alone. While Honneth has denied this charge,5
there may be some credence to it, in my view. In fact, this accusa-
tion may also be applicable to many authors within the DP tradition,
particularly those taking their theoretical cues from Derridean hos-
pitality ethics and Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge. En rap-
port with Foucault, theorists like Saba Mahmood urge us to view
‘embodied forms of attachment’ not as external to specific histori-
cal configurations of power/knowledge, but as constitutive of them
(2005: 36). Power, they argue, must be reimagined as displaced,
capillary and embedded within the relationality of the self and its
other, rather than as an institutional framework extrinsic to this rela-
tionality. Such writers see power as residing, in effect, everywhere,
encompassing and circulating within the embodied forms of resist-
ance to power itself. Honneth adopts a rather different view, describ-
ing power as a situation in which the ‘objectivating attitude’ becomes
characteristic of self-other relations, such that the individual is ‘mis-
recognized’ as a mere insensate object.6 Yet, whatever their discrep-

5 
To Honneth, efforts to transform the political and economic spheres
of modern capitalist societies rest on the (at least tacit) acknowledgment,
and symbolically mediated interpretation, of the normative principles
that underlie these domains. Yet, rather than simply subsume the so-
called subsystems within the analytical idiom of cultural recognition,
as Fraser alleges, he insists that his aim is to disclose the ‘epoch-specific
grammar of social justice and injustice’ that structures conflict and social
change within them (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 250).
6 
Honneth maintains that such a moral injury to the self is manifest
differently within three discrete recognition domains. At the level of
 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism  F  143

ancies, there is a certain affinity between Honneth and DP informed

by Foucauldian power/knowledge analysis, in that both seek to col-
lapse the Habermasian distinction between an anormatively organ-
ized systems sphere and a normatively constituted lifeworld.
There is also a point of resonance between Honneth and think-
ers who conduct their genealogical excavations of the postcolonial
‘margin’ from the standpoint of Derridean difference ethics. It is true
that unlike the latter, Honneth — on guard against the prospect of
a totalizing heterogeneity — attempts to subordinate the antecedent
asymmetrical orientation of concern for the ineradicably singular to
the universalistic standpoint of impartial, equal treatment. However,
in situating the recognitional stance at the conceptual and genetic
core of all spheres of social life, his morally monistic vantage point
risks making the detached, anormative type of action coordination
characteristic of institutionalized forms of power amenable to inter-
pretation ‘all the way down’. Indeed, Honneth diminishes our ability
to discern the point at which the objectivating attitude gives rise to
reifying effects, inasmuch as he construes recognitional normativity
as constitutive of that attitude itself. The boundary between power
and recognition thus becomes rather slippery, depriving Honneth of
the theoretical resources that are needed to corral the prospect of an
all-pervasive phenomenology of recognitional experience.
A similar problem attends to the Derridean hospitality ethics
upheld by various proponents of DP. For such thinkers, the asym-
metrical orientation of concern for the irreducible otherness of the
other is precisely that from which postcolonial analysis and criticism
takes its ethico-political bearings. To be sure, neither the objectivating
attitude of power nor the normative standpoint of universal justice is
on this move nullified or abjured simpliciter. (Spivak, for one, insists
that there is no getting around the positing of norms, even if only in
a strictly contingent, strategic sense.)7Yet the hospitality-ethical per-
spective of DP remains saddled with the same evaluative deficit as its
Derridean progenitor: it neglects to sufficiently distinguish power and

affective attachments, misrecognition, or disrespect, entails some form

of damage to the integrity of the body; in the legal sphere, it involves the
repudiation of universal rights and the employment of various measures
of exclusion; and at the level of solidarity, we can speak of an affront to
one’s self-esteem (Honneth 1992: 129).
7 
See Spivak 1988b: 13 for more on ‘strategic essentialism’, an idea that
bears some resemblance to Judith Butler’s notion of ‘contingent founda-
tions’ (Butler 1995).
144  f  Richard Ganis

justice as discrete and divergent standpoints of measurability, which

can in turn be contrasted with the decidedly immeasurable orienta-
tion of care. Writers like Spivak prioritize the latter only to denude
their frameworks of a context-transcending vantage point from which
to distinguish between better and worse sets of social practices and
forms of constraint. Indeed, in making care their chief ethico-politi-
cal resource, they release postcolonial analysis and critique from the
injunction to measure, whether at an empirical-analytic (objectivat-
ing) or a historical-hermeneutic (symbolic) level. Absent this encum-
brance, the attitude of concern for the other’s absolute otherness
— the perspective of the incalculable — is privileged over and against
the requirement to provide universally defensible reasons.
It is because he keeps the domains of care, norm and power at
express conceptual and structural remove from one another that
Habermas is able to avoid these traps. First, in distinction to DP,
he subordinates the unilateral attitude of care to the standpoint
of reciprocative equal treatment, such that dialogic subjects have
recourse to a common, intersubjective standpoint from which to
adjudicate competing truth claims and constrain viewpoints, identi-
ties and conceptions of the good that seek to commandeer the field
of moral discourse in the service of their own particularistic ends.
Second, against Honneth’s monism — which detects recognitional
normativity at the genetic and conceptual spine of all problem- solv-
ing discourses — Habermas’ dualism disjoins purposive and com-
municative rationality at the level of both epistemology and social
structure. From its vantage point, redressing the reifying conse-
quences of the objectivating stance does not involve the retrieval of a
‘forgotten’ standpoint of caring recognition, as Honneth maintains.
Rather, Habermas’ system/lifeworld model positions us to envis-
age the moment at which strategic organizing directives have over-
stepped the threshold of benign action coordination and encroached
upon discourse aimed at mutual understanding, creating a situation
in which the technical and the moral-practical have become con-
flated (Habermas 1970: 113).8 For Habermas, the attitude of care
cannot be recuperated from the reifying attitude, as care is for him

8 
In response to such claims, Honneth would no doubt accuse me of
having imbibed Habermas’ unexamined functionalist prejudices. ‘The
question concerning the point at which objectifying attitudes unfold
their reifying effects’, he insists, ‘cannot be answered by speaking of
functional requirements in an apparently nonnormative way’ (2008: 55).
 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism  F  145

neither conceptually nor genetically constitutive of that orienta-

tion. In arguing to the contrary, Honneth, as I have noted elsewhere,
‘risks losing sight of the fact that the economic and bureaucratic
spheres of modern societies have a purposive-rational “life of their
own,” which is quite distinct from the hermeneutic-historical dis-
courses characteristic of the lifeworld’ (Ganis 2011: 139).
Of course, this is not to minimize the significance of Honneth’s
corrective to Habermas’ programme. At the level of social integration,
Honneth’s recognition theory provides a well-supported account of
why the asymmetrical attitude of care for the other anticipates and
makes possible the impartial, symmetrical standpoint of moral cogni-
tion. It enables us to accord architectonic primacy to the latter ori-
entation and to undertake a broader, corollary defence of Kantian
principles of toleration and world cosmopolitanism, while at the same
time fending off DP’s accusation that such a move entails a structur-
ally inescapable commitment to the obliteration and disqualification
of the one-sided perspectives, needs, goods, and definitional identities
that circulate within the shifting locations of postcolonial modernity.

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7
From Communicative Modernity
to Modernities in Tension
John Rundell

F rom his earliest work onwards, Jürgen Habermas has been a theo-
rist of modernity and has deployed — if not always explicitly — an
image of a modern world that is internally differentiated, rather than
one that is coordinated by a single totalizing logic, such as that of cap-
italism. Sociologically, Habermas contests the one-dimensional view
of modern societies that sees them as deriving from a basic unifying
core, feature or structure, the assumption of which produces a total-
izing picture that becomes the basis for a totalizing critique. More
recently, Habermas’ sociological discourse of modernity has also
enabled him to engage with the post-1989 and post-9/11 environ-
ments, which include phenomena such as terrorism, unilateralism,
population movements, and new nationalisms, as well as postnational
politics and multiculturalism. Instead of a modernization theory that
privileges economic and industrial development and a neo-liberalism
that privileges markets, then, Habermas (1996, 2001, 2006, 2009)
is able to critically engage in the so-called ‘new’ global environment
with his political ideal and programme of deliberative democracy and
cosmopolitanism, underpinned by his theory of communicative com-
petence and learning processes.
Nonetheless, this chapter will seek to contrast Habermas’ socio-
logical discourse of modernity and his underlying theory of evolu-
tionary learning processes with an alternative theory of modernity
as tension-ridden, dynamic and multiple. In what he has termed ‘the
linguistification of the sacred’, Habermas (1984) has argued that
there is an internal connection between the increasingly complex
and differentiated evolution of our relations with nature and the
organization of society, on the one hand, and the equally differenti-
ated evolution of cultural forms, on the other. In Habermas’ view,
these cultural forms are embodied arguments, rather than merely
worldviews. However, the first section of this chapter will argue that

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-10
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  149

in tying argumentation and the evolution of worldviews together,

Habermas circumscribes his own sociological discourse of modernity.
In the second section, Habermas’ theory of modernity will be
contrasted with a counter-model which is more pluri-dimensional
and tension-ridden, and thus contestatory and open-ended. Rather
than drawing on a linguistic paradigm and evolutionary impulses,
this counter-model is based on the concatenation of historically
indeterminate social imaginaries, among which there are irreduc-
ible tensions, conflicts and interpenetrations. This alternative theory
of modernity opens our understanding to non-Western versions of
modernity that are not circumscribed by evolutionary or occidental
models.1

Habermas’ Sociological Discourse of Modernity

Whilst it may appear that Habermas’ work is tied and oriented to
a European project and a European modernity, and can thus be
charged with Eurocentrism, he avoids this charge by grounding his
sociological discourse of modernity in a postmetaphysical philosophy
that appeals to universal quasi-transcendental and linguistically-con-
stituted competences that develop at the social level through cultur-
ally-situated evolutionary learning processes (Habermas 1979). As is
well known, for Habermas, modernity as a societal type is character-
ized by a differentiation and development of three types of action and
institutional complexes — science, morality and political legitima-
tion, and aesthetics. This differentiation has a homology at the philo-
sophical level, in that the differentiation of society is matched by the
differentiation of rationality and the formation of modalities of rea-
son, knowledge and action appropriate to the three spheres: science
is developed according to the principles of a cognitive construction of
rationality with its validation in terms of truth; political and legitima-
tory patterns of action and knowledge develop and proceed according
to the principles of a moral-practical rationality with its validation in
terms of normative rightness; and modern aesthetics develops accord-
ing to its own distinctive forms of rationality, the expressive, with
its own forms of validation regarding truthfulness and authenticity
(Habermas 1984, 1987b). The result of this ‘internal differentiation
of the sacred’, to draw on Habermas’ reconstruction of Durkheim,

I would like to thank Danielle Petherbridge and Tom Bailey for their
1 

comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

150  f  John Rundell

is that there are three distinct linguistically-constituted (rather

than simply mediated) realities with their own forms of validation
(Habermas 1984, 1987a; Rundell 1989: 5-24, 1992: 133-40).
For Habermas, at the level of the human species, modernity is
not only a world-historical phenomenon, but the result of species-
wide learning processes that are not reducible to context- depend-
ent situatedness. To put it slightly differently and in the language of
Habermas’ critique of communitarianism, modernity is not a ‘com-
munitarian’ project (Habermas 1998: 205-8, 2006: 115-93). Rather,
it is an unfinished one in which its normative content for legitimation
can only be grounded in an intersubjectively constituted notion of
reasonableness that can be argued and learnt (Habermas 1987a: 336-
67). In the context of crises of social differentiation, or of clashes
between traditional and post-traditional forms of life, Habermas
(2006) argues that there is recourse to ‘intermundane learning pro-
cesses’ through which the universality of normative rightness can be
articulated, even if painfully and gradually. Habermas thus combines
his differentiated theory of modernity with a commitment to the
political form of modern society.
Notwithstanding changes in formulations in Habermas’ oeuvre,
it is continuously fuelled by a very simple idea. It is worth fleshing
out this ‘simple idea’ in order to grasp its complexity and insights,
as well as its limitations when confronted with Habermas’ own
meta-theory.
In the context of ‘a modernity at variance with itself’ (1987a:
396), Habermas is preoccupied with the public and non-violent
strength of the better argument. Everyone should be able to take a
‘yes’ or ‘no’ position to statements about the world and the way it
is understood — whether or not these refer to nature, to society, or
to selves (Habermas 1984: 70). In the wake of his ‘linguistic turn’,
Habermas develops a notion of politics, which, at its most minimal
and anthropological, means a non-violent intersubjec- tivity in the
making, where words — or, more strictly, sentences or speech acts
— rather than rituals or weapons, are the form of intercourse that
counts. This utopian horizon remains the central, obstinately persis-
tent feature that resonates throughout his work. The utopian horizon
is thus freedom interpreted by him as reflexive deliberation, which is
his own version of democracy. This, in turn, is formulated as a ration-
ally motivated and discursively redeemable consensus formation.
Moreover, it typifies his work as belonging to one of the self-under-
standings of modernity — a self-understanding that he constantly
defends, criticizes and reconstructs (Habermas 1984, 1987).
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  151

At the sociological level, Habermas’ theorization of the political

form of modern society is filtered through a historically-rendered
interpretation of the formation of the public sphere. In Habermas’
important early analysis, this involved the separation of civil society
from the state, and the public sphere’s formation as a sphere of public
opinion by free and autonomous citizens separate from the private
realm of capitalistic economic activity. Habermas rightly argued that
economic ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ stand as two differentiated and compet-
ing aspects of the modern world, aspects that were either minimized
or treated as derivatives of one or the other in political philosophy
and social and critical theory from Kant onwards (1989).2
In his subsequent work, Habermas has reconceptualized the public
sphere in the context of the intersubjectively-constituted lifeworld,
from which norms originate and can be challenged in the form of
reflexive argumentation. He considers all other forms of interaction
to be power-saturated, ‘distorted’ or ideological, or determined by
systems imperatives. For Habermas, this principle of rational delib-
eration is also the founding one of critique. It is here that his earlier
historicized notion of the public sphere is circumscribed and folded
into a discursive notion of politics and re-conceptualized through the
perspective of his differentiated image of a modern society with its
paradoxes and pathologies. These pathologies emerge as a result of the
conflictual relations between system and lifeworld, which constitute
the battleground between the dynamics of modernity. There are sys-
temically derived colonizing tendencies that encroach upon the life-
world, tendencies that take the form of administrative-bureaucratic
control, which can be challenged by various groups and social move-
ments (Habermas 1984). For Habermas, this challenge should take
the form of normatively-grounded arguments that originate from the
lifeworlds of these social groups and social movements.
In Between Facts and Norms (1996), Habermas theorizes democ-
racy in terms of a deliberative constitutional republic in which the
public sphere takes the form of a formal-deliberative democracy, still
anchored in the intersubjective and normative imperatives of the life-
world. In Habermas’ later work, the public sphere becomes identical
with the notion of undistorted and unimpeded rational-delibera-
tive argumentation about matters that can become topicalized and

2 
In this context, Habermas also responded to the economism and
metaphysics of the paradigms of labour and production embedded in
Marx’s work.
152  f  John Rundell

politicized. The public sphere is viewed as both the space for rational
argument and a conduit through which democratization is expressed
in its formalization through law (Habermas 1996, 1998).
It is in this context of deliberative argumentation, which is the
result of the increasing, intersubjectively-constituted linguis-tifica-
tion of the politically ‘sacred’, that Habermas articulates his con-
cerns in terms of contemporary political modernity. For him, political
modernity is no longer synonymous with the territorial boundedness
of the nation-state. The postnational constellation of supra-state
organizations, conventions and treaties means that for Habermas,
political modernity has transcended state boundaries. The problem,
for him, is whether in this context there is normative ‘over-taxing’ or
‘over-stretching’ — that is, whether normativity can be anchored in
a community of citizens where these political citizens do not share a
common set of lifeworld experiences, especially in the face of increas-
ing diversity of forms of life in secular, postnational and even reli-
gious settings. ‘Europe’ may not be enough (Habermas 2001: 58-112,
2006: 115-93, 2009: 78-105). ‘Really existing Europe’ becomes a
vehicle through which Habermas can explore his own disquiet, with
some interesting results that nonetheless expose the limits of his own
theorization.
As Habermas makes clear in his remarks on cosmopolitanism or
the ‘internationalization of international law’, as well as on the place
of religion in ‘postsecular’ society, a learning process is required on
both sides of the national-postnational divide, or the secular-religious
one, to acknowledge the linkage in modernity between norms, law
and democracy in which recognition of diversity — diverse polities,
diverse religions — occurs through the modern category of citizen-
ship. Citizenship is the point of mediation for this diversity, and
democratic constitutions are their ‘linguistified’ form of articulation.
Citizenship, for Habermas, is an actor-category, not only of inclusion,
but also, in principle, of the citizen qua actor’s capacity for rational,
public, deliberative, and even ‘disobedient’ argumentation through
which a political consensus can be formed (Habermas 1985: 95-116,
2006: 115-93, 2009: 59-77). Habermas extends this notion of the
democratic constitution to include treaties and conventions that lie
at the heart of the European Union and other ‘postnational’ arrange-
ments and agreements.
In so arguing, Habermas articulates and prioritizes the rational-
argumentative as a principle of linkage between the ‘linguistically-
constituted’ formations or systems of the nation-state, postnational
arrangements and political democratization. For him, the linkage
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  153

occurs between law and democracy with the republican- democratic

constitution as the point of mediation. As he states,

a constitution can be thought of as a historical project that each gen-

eration continues to pursue . . . Modern constitutions owe their exist-
ence to a conception found in modern natural law according to which
citizens come together voluntarily to form a legal community of free
and equal consociates (1996: 203, sentences inverted).

In terms that attempt to bring together liberal and republican dimen-

sions, as well as formal and contextualist ones, Habermas argues that
there is a necessary conceptual relation between private and public
autonomy and right. The bearers of individual rights are intersubjec-
tively-constituted, and it is here that Habermas makes the internal
link. In his view, the linguistically-construed intersubjective con-
stitution of the lifeworld means that at the deepest anthropological
level, politics is already a form of association, a form of sociability
that is an open embodied argument, and thus normatively structured
and contestable. Instead of ‘the fragmentation of multicultural socie-
ties and the Babylonian confusion of tongues in an overly complex
global society’, there is the capacity for normative claims and their
validation in universalistic terms, because these are imbedded in the
speech acts between interlocutors (ibid.: 208). For Habermas, the
modern constitution as the form of modern politics is an institution-
alized form of intersubjectively constituted interlocution. As indi-
cated above, this theory of political modernity is the centrepiece of
Habermas’ entire work.
However, in tying political forms to language and to sociocul-
tural evolution, Habermas is faced with at least two problems. By
linking history with validation, and especially with the validation of
norms, he ultimately considers the formal articulation of these norms
in argument to be enough. The issue here is not so much, as many
critics have pointed out, that validation is separated from originating
contexts. Rather, an earlier criticism still stands — namely, that this
formal separation does not generate the possibility for new content. It
only makes explicit the implicit veracity of the speech act (Arnason
1982: 228). The explication exposes the universalistic potential of all
claims against which the ‘living’ veracity of old and new forms of life
can be judged. Especially in Habermas’ later work, a tension emerges
between his allowing a conceptual space to emerge for the creation
of new social meanings in all of their hues, from the most brutal
to the most benign, and his reduction of this conceptual space to
quasi-transcendental for- malistic criteria. From a more contextualist
154  f  John Rundell

vantage point, the issue is one of competing images and programmes

of modernity that are situated within longer-term contexts and ori-
entated by particular horizons.
The linkage between law and democracy and the formation of
democratic constitutional states can only be viewed as an achieve-
ment of modernity. Yet it is a contingent achievement, rather than
the result of an a priori intersubjectivity that combines language and
normativity and develops as sociocultural evolution through learn-
ing processes. No matter how sophisticated his formulation, the
evolutionary thrust of Habermas’ theory through learning processes
restrictively thematizes the existence of the human species as one of
language users, a thematization that pre-determines and sets limits
to the historical direction of human development and to changes in
the ways that humans and human societies perceive and understand
themselves. In Habermas’ work, this evolutionism means that the
‘higher stage’ — modernity — is trapped in a hermeneutical circle
orientated to a prior value of validation. Modernity, and indeed dif-
ferent modernities, are judged by Habermas in terms of their increas-
ing ability to argue and test the case for truth statements or normative
rightness, and to reach agreements about these.
There is thus an internal relation between argumentation and
the lessons that can be learnt concerning this deliberative ability.
Habermas therefore views catastrophes such as the totalitarianisms
of yesterday and the fundamentalisms of today as pathological move-
ments away from a learning process, rather than as historical crea-
tions in their own right.
This reliance on learning processes becomes evident, for exam-
ple, in Habermas’ recent discussions concerning the heightened sen-
sibility to religious pluralism in contemporary (European) societies.
Habermas thinks that interreligious encounters may be resolved
through learning processes and the steps that European states, as
well as the European Union, are willing to take to embrace or limit
the plurality of religious practices. He admits that it remains an open
question whether the relation between faith and democracy can
be pursued through learning and argumentation alone (Habermas
2008). Perhaps, it would be more accurate to suggest that this pos-
sibility depends on a perspective shared by both believers and non-
believers, which ultimately cannot be argued either for or against,
and which is also unenforceable. But if this is the case, then the force
and the creation of this perspective must originate, not from lan-
guage and learning processes, but elsewhere (Rundell 2010c: 36).
This leaves open the question that learning and argumentation are
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  155

grounded in imaginary horizons that precede both. It is to the nature

and creation of these imaginaries, in their ontological and modern
forms, that we now turn.

Contingent Imaginaries of Modernity

A critique of Habermas’ sociological discourse of modernity can begin
from an observation that modernity, like social worlds more gener-
ally, is indeterminate, rather than the result of sociocultural learn-
ing processes. Apart from the teleologically inspired herme-neutical
entrapment, there is also the problem of the status and weight that
Habermas attributes to learning processes themselves. For there to
be a learning process there needs to be a disposition to learn at least
something. My argument is that this disposition is orientated by a pre-
and/or non-linguistic and non-cognitive dimension through which we
can create social meaning. The learnt phenomenon of the political, like
learning in general, is a second-order process (Castoriadis 1991).
Social phenomena are indeterminate and distinct world creations.
This indeterminacy and distinctiveness highlights their contingency.
Following Castoriadis’ formulation, the creation of contingent social
worlds can be termed the creation of social imaginaries. Rather than
concentrating on the activities of linguistification, or phenomenologi-
cal or interpretative worlding, Castoriadis concentrates on the creation
of societies. 3 For Castoriadis, societies and their histories are indeter-
minate creations, not ‘things’ that are perceived as real; neither are
they products of rational thinking or language games. Put differently,
‘reality, language, values, [norms,] needs and labour in each society,
specify, in each case, in their particular mode of being, the organiza-
tion of the world and the social world related to the social imaginary
significations instituted by the society in question’ (Castoriadis 1987:
371). Castoriadis’ notion of social imaginary emphasizes the histori-
cally indeterminate creation of meaning, which is not reducible to
language, symbols, function, or learning processes, even if it leans and
relies on these. Social imaginary significations glue society together
(ibid.: 142). Put differently, social imaginary significations are forms
of social meaning that humans create and through which they organ-
ize their world. They are meaning-constituted social figurations
through which we interconnect and interact in very specific ways.

3 
The term ‘imaginary’ is thus used differently from the way Charles
Taylor deploys this term (2007: 173).
156  f  John Rundell

The creation of specific social imaginary significations is no less the

case for modernity than for any other society or history. Modernity
is a unique historical creation, as are other societies and histories.
The characteristic of uniqueness does not mean that modernity is a
singular social imaginary enclosed within itself and identified with a
fixed time and a fixed place, separated from other times and places.
Rather, indeterminacy means that modernity may not have been cre-
ated and that different modernities can also be created that are dis-
tinct in character, time and place.
These images of indeterminate and different modernities have
been portrayed under the term ‘multiple modernities’, although this
formulation tends to emphasize different geographical regions and
histories of modernities. It also emphasizes their own interactions
with their own equally unique civilizational and longer historical con-
texts. The ‘multiple modernities’ literature tends to emphasize the
different experiences of modernity in regional terms — for example,
Japanese modernity, Indian modernity, Chinese modernity, or Iranian
modernity. Against a backdrop of over-inflated claims concerning a
globalized ‘modernity’ or a ‘European’ or ‘American’ civilization that
is projected as a globalized entity, this body of literature argues that
specific and competing modernities are created.4 The development of
the sensibility to non-Western horizons and the critique of the West
and its colonial past constitute the continual creation, reinterpreta-
tion and reconstruction of different cultural programmes, and thus
the construction of multiple modernities. This has occurred on both
sides of the so-called ‘West-East’ divide, including ‘attempts by vari-
ous groups and movements to re-appropriate modernity and redefine
the discourse of modernity in their own terms’ (Eisenstadt 2003:
517). Shmuel Eisenstadt goes on to argue that

while the common starting point of many of these developments was

indeed the cultural program of modernity as it developed in the West,

4 
It is here that some critics of Habermas often concentrate their
efforts, regarding either the social evolution of the political form of
modernity that he assumes or his circumscribed version of modern state
formation, which downplays its role as a social imaginary that constructs
and coordinates versions of modernity, including the totalitarian option
(see Arjoman 2004, 2005; Arnason 1993, 1996, 2002; Eisenstadt 2003).
Arnason introduces the notion of modernity as a field of tensions in his
commentary on Habermas’ work in Arnason 1991.
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  157

more recent developments gave rise to a multiplicity of cultural and

social formations which go far beyond the very homogenizing aspects
of the original version. All these developments do indeed attest to a
continual development of multiple modernities, or the multiple inter-
pretation of modernity — and above all the de-Westernization of the
decoupling of modernity from its ‘Western’ pattern, of depriving, as it
were, the West from [the] monopoly of modernity. It is in this broad
context that European or Western modernity or modernities have to
be seen not as the only real modernity but as one of multiple moderni-
ties (ibid.: 517–18).

As indicated above, these multiple developments also entail that

the historical context cannot be separated from the way in which
each modern social imaginary is both created and viewed. There are
unique civilizational backdrops, encounters, conflicts, and engage-
ments against which different modernities develop. In this way,
credence is given to the specific characteristics of regional and civili-
zational identities and geographies, and to the way in which tensions
and conflicts are constitutive of them.
On a conceptual and more formal level, rather than only on the
substantive one, the notion of multiple modernities invites the artic-
ulation of the constituent social imaginary significations through
which modernity is being reconstructed by the theorists who deploy
this term.5 This articulation can be expressed through a companion

5 
Eisenstadt’s own conceptualization of multiple modernities, for
example, concentrates on the distinction and relation between politics
and the state. For him, politics concerns ideological and institutional
arrangements and elite formations, whilst he analyses the modern state
from the vantage point of its territorialization in the context of inter-
state relations, even when these states are modern empires. In other
words, for Eisenstadt, bounded territoriality is the defining issue (2003:
493-571). The works of Niklas Luhmann and Agnes Heller are also of
note. In Luhmann’s neo-systems theory, systems are products of socio-
cultural evolution and define themselves in an autological relation with
an environment, and hence develop semantic codes as forms of distinc-
tion and observation. For Luhmann (1995)— as for Habermas, with
whom Luhmann was a dialogic partner — modernity is increasingly dif-
ferentiating through the specialization of semantic codes of functions.
In principle, modernity is almost an infinitely internally differentiating
system. For Heller, modernity is a contingent historical formation, the
coalescence of three particular ‘logics’ or social imaginaries that do not
158  f  John Rundell

notion of modernities in tension. The concept of modernities in

tension places emphasis not on the distinctiveness of its particular
regions, but rather on the constituent social imaginaries through
which a modernity can be identified. There is the development and
crystallization of distinct social imaginary significations, each with
its own long history, self-understanding and emotional, rather than
merely rational, vocabularies. However, because these constituent
dimensions are also indeterminate creations, they stand in a disag-
gregated, rather than only differentiated, relation to one another in a
way that does not ‘add up’ or click together as a system. The emphasis
on indetermination and distinctive modern social imaginaries in for-
mal and substantive terms highlights a three-fold combination of the
specificity of modern social imaginaries, the long histories of regions
and cultures, and conflicts at the junctures of these forces. These
combinations are historically indeterminate and generate a social
form that is tension-ridden, yet open.
As indicated above, there is a modern distinctiveness that under-
lies each imaginary, in that they are all imbued with a heightened
sense of contingency and openness (Eisenstadt 2003; Heller 1999).
Conceptualizing the contingency and openness of social imaginaries
challenges the assumption that the world and people’s lives within it
are fixed, and that there is a sense of time that is pre-determined in
either cyclical or linear terms that combine past, present and future in
terms of a more or less uninterrupted continuity. Modernity in each
of its imaginaries disaggregates this sense of time. To put it slightly
differently, time is pluralized (Luhmann 1995; Rundell 2010a).
Modernity is thus revolutionary in ways that do not equate it with
the usual political meaning of the term. It is context breaking in the
way that, for example, Rousseau deploys the love relation between
St. Preux and Julie in his Nouvelle Heloise or the New Julie. This is a
love that is created by the lovers and breaks with the past and pater-
nalistic forms of power, opening onto a contingent future (Rousseau
1968). Marx would put it differently, yet with no less passionate a
spirit, when he portrays modernity’s dynamism through his famous

add up to a totality. As she spells out in her work (Heller 1999 and
2011a), for her there are three modern imaginaries, namely, technology,
the functional allocation of social positions and political power. Political
power comprises both the institutions of freedom and the institutions of
government, including those of authority, coercion and the invention of
totalitarianism.
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  159

phrase in The Communist Manifesto, ‘all that is solid melts into air’
(1967: 83; see also Berman 1982). It is context breaking in the sense
that a world can be built anew and differently from pre-existing
ones (Arendt 1973). Contingency and openness denote possibilities
of freedom. This is what gives modernity its revolutionary sense.
There are different meanings of freedom and of contingency and
openness, and these different meanings become imbedded in the dif-
ferent modern social imaginaries. As such, there are tensions and con-
flicts between these meanings. Instead of a pathological impingement
or colonization of the lifeworld by the system, as Habermas would
have it, there is, in formal and not only substantive terms, a compe-
tition between various social imaginaries. Specifically, the modern
social imaginary significations, with their own particular meanings
of contingency and openness, include the general and global mon-
etarization of social life orientated by the market, industrialization,
expressivist aesthetics, nation-state formation, modern democratiza-
tion and public spheres.
As I have discussed each modern imaginary elsewhere (Rundell
1997, 2007, 2010a, 2010b), I will briefly present each in a formal
and ideal-typical manner, keeping in mind the ways in which these
modernities have been created by social groups and actors who create
and interpret the horizons of openness and contingency, and hence
forms of social relatedness, in their own particular ways.
Money becomes the social imaginary signification that is created
to denote increasingly abstract exchanges between contingent stran-
gers. If Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money rather than Marx’s Capital
is taken as our starting point, money constitutes and mediates the
material conditions of capital, which revolves around a dual process
of the subsumption of labour under capital and the extension of mar-
ket-driven economies, mediated by the money form and the restless,
ceaseless expansion of the horizon of needs.
It is more than this, however. As a social imaginary, money is the
means through which modernity’s horizon of openness is created as
limitlessness; there is nothing that it cannot touch, nowhere it can-
not go. In addition, money as a social imaginary signification enables
us to create contingency as a form of social connection that is purely
abstract and has no social ties except for the activity of exchange in
the medium of calculation, irrespective of whether one is a producer,
a distributor, or a consumer. Money, however, is not simply a value,
a price, but a cultural form that has coherence as a meaning that is
also a social figuration, which interlocks us in very specific ways. As
160  f  John Rundell

moderns, we become calculators and not simply strategists, manipu-

lating the price of literally everything (Simmel 1978).
The modern imaginary of work, or what I have also termed the
‘technical-industrial’ imaginary, emphasizes function — of machines,
signs, humans. It turns the latter into functionaries, those who per-
form roles. The emphasis on role and role performance heightens
contingency and de-personalizes and de-naturalizes the image of
what it means to be a human being. The world of modern function-
alized work becomes increasingly indifferent to prescriptive charac-
teristics. Both men and women become viewed simply as contingent
role performers, equally hireable and replaceable with other human
role performers, or with machines. Yet, this functionalized meaning
of contingency narrows the meaning of modern openness. Working,
as an activity, is narrowed to the specialization of tasks that are dif-
ferentiated according to this specialization. This specialization or
mono-functionalization is matched by the mono-functionalization
of science, the creativity of which is narrowed to the application of
technical-cognitive solutions to problems that are viewed in func-
tionalized terms only.
Many of the conflicts around the modern imaginary of work
involve issues regarding the manifestation and consequences of func-
tionalization and specialization. Such conflicts contest, for example,
the reduction of persons to roles and functions and, as such, their
replaceability on this basis. In addition, conflicts also contest the
regimes of technical management and micro-control that have been
put into place to control these roles and functions (Sennett 2006).
The autonomy of art as a separate imaginary and practice, whilst
not unrelated to the development of specialized aesthetic techniques
and technologies and the formation of public spheres, became a
basis through which moderns could contest the traditional aesthet-
ics of the sacred, as well as critique other imaginaries of modernity
in the context of forming their own aesthetic codes and practices.
Moderns who created and embraced aesthetic modernity also created
and embraced a new concept of culture, through which contingency
and openness could be interpreted. Contingency was interpreted as
experimentation in style that opened form beyond itself, whether
this took place in painting, music, or poetry. In this context, open-
ness was interpreted from the vantage point of a source of creativity
that was located beyond the mundane world. Moderns interpreted
aesthetics as a form of transcendence, and this also meant that, as
transcendence, aesthetics could become a remedy for modernity’s ills
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  161

in the form of art, love or even death.6 Suffering and aesthetics, rather
than eros and aesthetics, became a motif through which artists could
create a life that was open to transcendence, contingent and no longer
anchored in schools of art, yet separate from the mundane existences
identified with money, work and the state. Artists made, and were
left to, their own contingent suffering (Goethe 1989; Markus 2011;
Schiller 1967).
If money is the social form through which we create social life in
increasingly abstract ways, work the form through which we create
social life in functionalized ways and aesthetics a way of life of iso-
lated suffering, then the nation-state is modernity’s most concrete
and integrating one. It is, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, moder-
nity’s ‘imagined community’, tying together modernity’s contingent
strangers in a shared territory through commonly shared mecha-
nisms of identity and control, where civilizational backdrops matter
the most and can become a source of both cohesion and conflict.
However, nation-state integration is a two-edged sword. It provides
a home, and yet the modern imaginary of the nation-state is created
in such a way that constrains rather than promotes openness, espe-
cially in the context of the contingency, not of markets, but of pop-
ulation movements, of migration and settlement. The nation-state
became the imaginary institution through which both the intensive
and extensive control of a territory was created and sustained over
time. New instruments of control were created, from the de-person-
alization of law and bureaucracy to the creation of standing armies,
diplomacy, passports, and the category of national-juridical citizen-
ship. The social imaginary of the organization of the modern state
enhances entitlement through this category, whilst simultaneously
limiting contingency and openness.
In the context of multiple modernities, one can talk about spe-
cifically national, and therefore selective, developments and insti-
tutional patterns that are part of the more general story regarding
the formation of nation-states. Yet the core of the imaginary of the
nation-state, even in substantive or ‘multiple’ contexts, revolves
around the control of control, that is, not simply the development

6 
The current interest in religion sits at the intersection of Romantic,
civilizational and cultural impulses, re-introducing the question of the
boundary of the human into a postmetaphysical environment from the
perspective of a posited realm of transcendence distinct from the human
one. See, for example, Roberts 2011 and Taylor 2007.
162  f  John Rundell

of instruments of nation-state control — administrative apparatuses,

diplomacy, armies, territory, identity, and so on — but the control
of these instruments (Rundell 2010a: 46-47). From the perspective
of the nation-state, contingency is stabilized around the control of
the nation’s control dimensions. Openness is orientated to and by
international contexts, but, paradoxically, it is stabilized around the
control of processes and boundaries, even if these processes shift
to a higher level of abstraction as, for example, in the case of the
European Union.7
The paradox of openness and closure can also result in the crea-
tion of absolute outsiders, which can lead to another version of the
nation-state — a barbarous one. Jacobinism, totalitarianism and fun-
damentalism are the most significant examples of modern barbarous
creations. Totalitarianism and fundamentalism are experiments in
de-differentiation and enforced reductions of contingency, openness
and complexity, experiments which are created from the perspec-
tive of the nation-state imaginary. The result of the totalitarian and
fundamentalist options is the bounded closure of the state and the
construction and prioritization of a singular identity through which
there can emerge the identification or marking of contingent stran-
gers as absolute outsiders — that is, as those who are outside the
boundaries of both territory and identity.8

7 
The contemporary assessment that we are now in a ‘postnational con-
stellation’, which Habermas also articulates, minimizes the active role
that nation-states have in pursuing their interests, underwriting the pro-
cesses of internationalization and globalization that have occurred and
responding to these. What is often overlooked, however, is a transforma-
tive capacity that nation-states may have in adapting to external shocks
and pressures by invoking new forms of governance and policy formation
(Weiss 1998). Moreover, the strong version of the globalization thesis
also underestimates the role of nation-states in forming types of ‘gov-
erned interdependence’ (ibid.: 38-39). Governed interdependency is not
simply the internationalization of governance in the form of institutions
such as the United Nations, the European Union, or international treaties
and conventions. The nation-state is assumed to be the basic ‘social’ unit,
and is required as a functioning one of juridical authority and legitimacy
if these bodies, treaties and conventions are to be meaningful at all.
8 
Robespierre and Lenin remain the originators of this aspect of
modernity, and it is one that has travelled and continues to travel widely,
irrespective of the ‘languages’ in which it is spoken. Lenin invented
the technical machinery of totalitarianism, although Carl Schmitt
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  163

The creation of the social imaginary of the nation-state and its

imperializing mission did not, however, go uncontested by the con-
tingent strangers who found themselves within its boundaries, and
thus subject to its power-saturated and administrative scope. People
created other versions of rulership in which the sovereignty of the
nation lay in its people. It became articulated in the claim for political
citizenship, which co-existed alongside the national- juridical one.
Citizenships were created in which all issues, from those addressing
the state to those of markets, work and domestic life, could be raised
and fought over. Citizenship became a point of condenscation and
contestation, rather than one that internally linked norm and law in
the way that Habermas supposes (Rundell 1998).
However, the creation of citizenships did not exhaust the way
democracy was created and interpreted. As Habermas’ work indi-
cates, politics was also created in a manner of sociability, one that
minimizes the use and threat of violence in its mobilization of
resources of power. 9 The creation of democratic forms in both formal

contributed to this current with his negative assessment of modernity

(which is absent in Lenin’s work) in terms of the distinction between
friend and enemy. The current terrorisms are de facto civil wars that orig-
inate from within the terrorists’ nations of origin and are projected onto
the world stage. They are not the result of inter-civilizational conflicts.
Rather, they are highly specific responses which take their model as the
imaginary of the nation-state,
9 
The creation of the democratic imaginary of modernity not only
includes the American and French revolutions, but also the Renaissance
city states, the Swiss and Dutch republics and the 1989 ‘anti-totalitarian
revolutions’ (Arendt 1973; Collins 1999; Morin 1992). And, as we have
seen recently in 2011 in the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula, demo-
cratic imaginaries are still in the making and it is an open question what
form, if any, they will take. Whilst all of the attention has been on Tunisia,
Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, Oman is an interesting case here. In
much of the published research literature, Oman is viewed as a society
that has recently been modernized after emerging from a period of isola-
tion during the early part of the twentieth century. In a more nuanced
way, it has been conducting its own democratic experiments within the
horizons of the democratic imaginary, Ibadism and an enlightened mon-
archy within the context of its own tensions of modernity. Oman was a
trading empire centred in the cities of Muscat, Zanzibar and Makran,
which gave it a disposition to openness (see Al-Haj 1996; Ghubash 2006;
Jones and Ridout 2005; Peterson 2005).
164  f  John Rundell

and multiple contexts emphasize contingency and openness and limi-

tation. This limitation is created in the form not only of constitution-
making that limits state violence, protects negative freedoms and
codifies democratic norms, but also of a self-limitation in the form of
non-violent conduct towards others with whom one is engaged with
in politics. These forms of limitation and self- limitation are disposi-
tions, part of the open and contingent nature of the modern politi-
cal imaginary, and they enable reflexive breakthroughs to be created,
even if the outcome of these cannot be assured.
However, the imaginary of politics is often under-interpreted if it is
equated only with democracy and as a category of a right of participa-
tion in power and the organization of society. The imaginary of politics
also includes the formation of public spheres. Although the dimen-
sion of the public is central to Habermas’ own reconstruction, in his
later work the public sphere is folded into the process of political com-
munication, and as such becomes a conduit for these communicative
processes. Strictly speaking, though, the processes of democratization
and the creation of public spheres are not coterminus, either concep-
tually or historically. If democracy is about limitation and self-limita-
tion, then the public sphere concerns an open limitlessness, not in a
moneyed form, but in an expressivist one. After the invention of the
printing press at the end of the 15th century, publishing houses flour-
ished that produced books, encyclopaedias, newspapers and journals.
Literary publics of writers, publishers and readers thus emerged.10 The
spoken word too found new venues and spaces. Coffee houses and
salons emerged where men, and later also women, met to discuss the
political affairs of the day, as well as intellectual matters that had often
been the preserve of the universities, which had already developed a
space for reflexive thinking, no matter how specialized. Not only argu-
ment, but also jokes, satire and other comedic forms developed that
became part of the public sphere and threw ‘the ordinary business’ of
everyday life as well as politics into relief (Heller 2011a).
Aesthetic public spheres also emerged, especially in the forms of
theatres, museums, art galleries and concert houses. These became
‘sacred-secular’ spaces of reflection and contemplation where one
could, for a brief moment, establish one’s own unique relation with

10 
Taking as a point of reference Habermas’ earlier Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere rather than either The Theory of
Communicative Action or Between Facts and Norms, the situation is more
differentiated and differentiating than a homology between democracy
and the public sphere might suggest.
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  165

an artwork and oneself without purpose or intent (Heller 2011b). In

these particular publics — which now encompass private space, and
irrespective of which country one resides in — one need not be a spe-
cialist, aesthetic creator, or consumer, nor someone engaged in state-
craft or someone who argues and engages politically. One is simply
someone who in a contingent way establishes an involved, rather than
distanced or indifferent, relation to a specific object or experience.
The public sphere in all of its forms became, and continues to be, a
rallying point for claims by all social actors not simply for argument,
but for freedom of expression and the coexistence of these freedoms.
Modernity, then, can be viewed as an umbrella concept under
which quite different imaginaries are gathered, including critical ten-
dencies, conflicts and social movements, all of which can also be seen
against specific cultural or civilizational backdrops (Rundell 2010c:
19-40). The 18th century cannot be viewed as the century that gave
birth to modernity, and nor can Europe be viewed as the only site
for its development. In addition, each of the modern social imagi-
naries of money, machine- or sign-driven technologies, expressive
aesthetics, nation-state organization, democracy and public spheres
is constituted by its own collective actors, who, to begin with, are
contingent strangers to one another, brought together by these con-
texts. Each of these modern social imaginaries of contingency and
openness will have its own counter-movements that may contest the
nature of money, labour and industry, the identity and organizational
imperatives of the modern state, the nature of democracy and public
spheres, and the nature of aesthetic creativity and its practices and
subjectivity. This makes modernity conflict-ridden and perspectiv-
istic — its content is filled by the reference point and this reference
point can shift according to the ‘modernity’ one is talking about.
From the vantage point of multiple modernities or modernities in
tension, no one imaginary can claim the mantle of modernity tout
court. No one imaginary can claim to push us to a glorious future
or to save us. If it does, it is usually with inglorious consequences.
There are modernities, each with its own dynamism and paradoxes,
and there are tensions between these modernities. In other words,
modernity does not add up. It is not a totality, yet we still live within
and constitute its orbits, wherever we may live.

Tensions, Dissonance and Publics

These social imaginaries are not self-enclosed or completely autolog-
ical systems in the sense that Niklas Luhmann (1995), for example,
constructs his own systems theory, notwithstanding his distinction
166  f  John Rundell

between system and environment. They are not immune to either

influence or interpenetration. Yet tensions arise as to the relation-
ality and often the non-translatability between the imaginaries them-
selves. Notwithstanding this issue of non-translatability, there is a
blurring of boundaries between the imaginaries, which potentially
informs and transforms each of them. They are not as ‘buffered’ or
as separate as Taylor (2007), for one, suggests. They are ‘porous’ in
that they can be more or less open to transformation, where openness
does not necessarily result in, or become identical with, a de-differ-
entiated annihilation of distinctions, or the subsumption and control
of all of the imaginaries by one of them, as has been historically the
case for the imaginary of the state in its totalitarian form. Even the
modern imaginary of monetarization can never be as rapacious or
omnivorous as its totalizing champions and critics suggest. One par-
ticular imaginary cannot be viewed as co-extensive with modernity
or have attributed to it a primary cause. There are only irreducible
and irresolvable tensions between the imaginaries. The result is para-
doxical: whilst there may be claims for homogeneity and unity, there
is only tension, conflict and dissonance.
Since modernity is multiple, plural and heterodox (Eisenstadt
2003), it is filled by the questions and perspectives of each interlocu-
tor, of each interpreter who creates his or her modernity. It all looks
quite different depending on the position from which one is look-
ing, and the social imaginary one is orientated to or imbedded in.
One can be a market-orientated capitalist whose world is constituted
through money, a functionalist and role-performer, an aesthe- tician,
an etatist, a democrat or an actor in the public sphere. One can give
monetary-market-based, functional-technical, aesthetic, state-cen-
tred, or democratic-public responses to modern crises, irrespective
of where these crises originate from. Each position generates its own
perspective, which is also the standpoint that is valued, and thus has
evaluative reach. We usually articulate some, but not all, of these
perspectives.
Nonetheless, the recognition and acknowledgement of irresolva-
bility is itself a value position orientated by one of modernity’s social
imaginaries. Irresolvability is the most open dimension of moder-
nity’s political imaginary, which need not be articulated as consen-
sus, but as dissonance. Dissonance assumes the multiple existence of
independent voices. It is a reflexive discordance in which the other
coexists in the same space, without interference and with its own
distinct and different voice. This space is constituted by the cultural
horizons of contingency and openness, which, in this context, are
 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in Tension  F  167

the reference points for mutual coexistence and autonomy amongst

contingent strangers (Seel 2004: 267; Rundell 2007: 449).
The public sphere remains a cultural model for this affirmative
version of modernity, once it is freed from a preoccupation with
deliberative democracy and re-oriented not to argumentation alone,
but to spaces of openness and reflexive and contemplative coexist-
ence that are not incorporated into the vicissitudes of power, includ-
ing its democratic version. In terms of multiple modernities, this
emphasis on the public sphere makes cities — whether Western or
non-Western ones — central. In contrast to Habermas, this central
positioning does not occur from the vantage point of the evolution of
modernity, but from that of the creation and articulation of cultural
models of autonomy and mutuality in the context of the modern
horizons of contingency and openness. The cultural cosmopolitan-
ism of cities is, from this vantage point, more significant than the
modernities of functionalization and digitalization, nation-building
and interstate formation, or market-based monetarization in either
Western or non-Western contexts. As Max Weber remarked in a dif-
ferent context, ‘city air makes one free [Stadtluft macht frei]’ (1978:
1239). Openness becomes synonymous with an expressivist notion of
freedom, which is not reducible to either the aesthetic imaginary or
the democratic one. In its form as public spheres, more so than any of
the other modern imaginaries, the social imaginary of politics creates
this possibility of coexistences. It is this that presents the possibility
for a pluralization and alteration of horizons of self-creation, action
and understanding in the context of others.

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 Part III
Desecularizing


8
What is Living and What is Dead in
Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis?*1
Kevin W. Gray

T he secularization hypothesis plays an important role in Jürgen

Habermas’ work, particularly in his attempts to explain the ration-
alization of society and the structural differentiation of the lifeworld,
both of which occur alongside the concomitant development of social
systems, and in his attempt to develop a theory of law and democ-
racy. In this, Habermas draws heavily on the work of Max Weber.
Particularly in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber
argued that the rise of the secular European state was linked to the
interiorization of a Protestant ethic that removed religion from the
public sphere and made it into a private ethical matter of individu-
als, an interiorization of religion which occurred alongside —and,
indeed, often aided —the rationalization of society. The problem for
Habermas’ appropriation of Weber is that the secularization hypoth-
esis appears at worst false, and at best Eurocentric. The patterns of
modernization seen outside Europe suggest that rationalization is not
necessarily accompanied by secularization; moreover, many histori-
ans of Europe have contested Weber’s claims.
In this chapter, I will argue that some of the uses that Habermas
makes of the secularization hypothesis must be abandoned in light of
the criticisms of Weber’s corresponding hypothesis. However, I will
also argue that the most important conclusions that Habermas draws
from the secularization hypothesis can nonetheless be upheld, as they

*  I would like to thank the participants at workshops held at the

American University of Sharjah, Bogazici University, the Chinese
Academy of the Social Sciences, the University of Coimbra, and the
University of Groningen, and particularly Tom Bailey, for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-12
174  f  Kevin W. Gray

require only a more modest and plausible version of it, one which
focuses on rationalization, rather than secularization.1

Critical Theory and the Secularization Hypothesis

It is worth beginning with the work of Gyorgy Lukacs, through which
all discussions of the secularization hypothesis in Western Marxism
ultimately run. Lukacs spent his entire career bringing Weber and
Marx into dialogue (Tarr 1989: 131), and was thus at the forefront
of attempts to show the class unspecific effects — that is, the effects
beyond the impoverishment of the proletariat — that occurred along-
side the development of capitalism, particularly those effects that
were shared by all members of society. In particular, he introduced
to Marxism the idea of reification, by combining Marx’s idea of com-
modity fetishism with Weber’s critique of bureaucracy. Reification
— literally, the making of something into an object — occurs when
subjective social relationships take on the status of objects. In so
doing, what were originally free relations of individuals come to
appear as constant, fixed, immutable, and natural, much as the laws
of the economy do during fetishized exchange.2 Thus, Lukacs tries to
show how the institutionalization of purposive-rational action, and
with it fixed action orientations, leads to social pathologies.
The relationship between social pathology and rationalization in
Lukacs’ writings, and in particular the argument that rationalization
necessarily leads to social pathology, was taken up by the early mem-
bers of the Frankfurt School. Most importantly, Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment presents a negative
view not only of rationalization, but also of secularization, tying both
to the pathological development of modernity. The key term in this
crucial text is ‘enlightenment’, which Adorno and Horkheimer tie to

1 
Here, I will not treat Habermas’ extensive work on postsecularism,
since my concern is merely to show that the conclusions which Habermas
draws from Weber are still valid, in spite of serious historical and socio-
logical objections to The Protestant Ethic. For a discussion of Habermas’
work on postsecularism, see Péter Losonczi’s chapter in this volume.
2 
Briefly put, commodity fetishism is the act of making an objective
thing out of some subjective act of labour. See, for instance, Marx’s dis-
cussion in the first volume of Capital, Part 1, Section 1, Ch. 4 (1976:
163 et passim). Lukacs develops his interpretation in the chapter,
‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, of History and
Class Consciousness (1971).
 Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis  F  175

Weber’s definition of secularization and rationalization and define

negatively in terms of the loss of religion, or ‘the disenchantment of
the world’ (2002: 1). Specifically, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that
the development of modern rationality occurs in two distinct steps.
Whereas early processes of rationalization are tied to the mystical
world — for example, as attempts to reform religion or to explain the
world in light of religious beliefs — modern rationality changes its
relationship to religion by eliminating religious explanations from the
sciences and pushing the domain of religion inward (ibid.: 39). This
change in rationality is tied to a renewed interest in an autonomous
nature, available for scientific study, the study of which is a form of
‘devotion to God as the creator of an ordered cosmos’ (Taylor 2007:
94). Ultimately, however, advances in rationalization move away from
the study of the cosmos and lead to the rationalization of society,
bureaucratization and the fragmentation of traditional forms of life,
which in turn lead to reified social relationships and, with the death
of the mystical world order, to the fetishization of reason (Adorno and
Horkheimer 2002: 64, 73). It is this latter, developed sense of secu-
larization which Habermas, perhaps unfortunately, initially adopts.

Habermas’ Critical Reformulation of Weber

Eventually, Habermas rejects Adorno and Horkheimer’s radical pes-
simism. While he agrees that rationalization potentially brings with
it the seeds of society’s self-destruction, he argues that rationaliza-
tion also provides the opportunity for new forms of legitimation and
democratization. In particular, Habermas reinterprets the processes
of rationalization that give rise to a structurally differentiated life-
world so as to stress the liberatory potential offered by modernity.
Nevertheless, in spite of his reinterpretation of rationalization and at
least as far as his early and middle writings are concerned, Habermas
continues to believe that rationalization and secularization go hand
in hand. Indeed, I will suggest that it is ultimately to Habermas’
advantage that he relates them so closely — for I will argue that the
secularization hypothesis can be saved by recasting it terms of its
real content, namely, rationalization.
There are many ways to state Habermas’ critique and then rein-
terpretation of Adorno and Horkheimer. One way would be to say
that, for Habermas, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and
Horkheimer confuse the specific modes of capitalist consumer soci-
ety with a broader type of rationalization — interpreting rationali-
zation as merely the rationalization of production and consumption
176  f  Kevin W. Gray

inside the economy, rather than also as the broader rationalization

of knowledge (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 98). Another way to
say this is that Habermas criticizes Adorno and Horkheimer for con-
fusing system rationalization — that is, the introduction of modern
social systems, such as bureaucracy — with the rationalization of the
social world — that is, with ethics, science and so on.
However, Habermas’ criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer is not
rejectionist. Instead, he proposes to reinterpret Weber’s work on sec-
ularization so as to provide a gateway to discourse ethics, his theory
of democracy and the system-lifeworld model. At least in The Theory
of Communicative Action, he accepts Weber’s argument that disen-
chantment, or secularization, fulfilled the internal conditions for the
appearance of rationality in modern society (Habermas 1984: 143).
However, while for Weber the paradigmatic case of secularization
is the privatization of religion, Habermas is in many ways closer to
Adorno and Horkheimer in conflating secularization with rationali-
zation and the development of separate spheres in the lifeworld of sci-
ence and technology — for Habermas, as for Adorno and Horkheimer,
the development of these spheres of knowledge marked the begin-
ning of modern rationalization (ibid.: 155). After the development of
technology, systems of production quickly rationalized to allow the
bourgeois economy to grow, the production of art to become sepa-
rated from its pious function and a separate commerce to develop
(buttressed by secular civil law) that allowed for the separation of
state and economy (ibid.: 157-61). All of these modes of rationaliza-
tion resulted in the differentiation of the lifeworld, and sometimes
resulted in the development of different social systems.
Most interestingly, rationalization in Weber can also refer to the
growing autonomy of law from morality, as overarching religious
worldviews lose their hold on law (ibid.: 162). In fact, instead of an
overarching religious worldview anchored in the lifeworld, Habermas
argues that we must now speak of the rationalization of three spheres
of culture in society — namely, the cognitive, the expressive and
the moral. From Weber’s perspective, it is only the first and the sec-
ond of these spheres that rationalize in modern society, while the
moral sphere remains largely underdeveloped (Habermas 1984: 164).
The development of systems of expressive and cognitive rationality
(particularly the latter) leads to what Weber will identify as ration-
ality through procedure, and ultimately to bureaucratization and
reification.
In his critique of Weber, Habermas argues that the rationality
that Weber is discussing when he speaks of rationalization is really
 Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis  F  177

mere purposive-rationality (Zweckrationalitdt). This type of rational-

ity is not the most general type of rationality that can occur in the
lifeworld — that is, the rationality which can occur in all parts of
culture. For example, while the rationalization of productive forces
leads to bureaucratization (legitimation through procedure), there
are other processes in the broader world of both cultural and societal
rationalization, even if it appears that the only rationalization that
interests Weber is cultural rationalization (ibid.: 144, 168).
For Habermas, then, Weber makes three related mistakes. First,
he does not recognize that the rationalization of purposive-rational
action is a one-sided and highly contingent part of the rationalization
of society. Habermas argues that Weber cannot tie together under
rationality the various types of rationality that appear together in the
modern world: technical rationality, formal rationality, value rational-
ity, and rationality of life conduct (ibid.: 181-85). Second, Habermas
argues that, in his discussion of the secularization and rationalization
of society, Weber confuses two separate, but overlapping, types of
rationalization that occur in capitalist society — the rationalization
of culture and that of social systems. Third, Weber’s theory does not
adequately capture what is really going on in late capitalist society,
and cannot account for the persistence of unrationalized areas of the
lifeworld — in particular, morality. I will consider these three mis-
takes in turn.
In the first instance, Weber does not recognize that the ration-
alization of action is only one part of the rationalization of society.
Purposive-rationality is understood to occur inside sub-spheres of
society, such as the economy, and is action oriented towards the suc-
cessful realization of a goal. However, because Weber’s investigations
of rationalization only focus on explaining the core phenomena that
interest him — that is, the rationalization of the state and of the
economy — he does not recognize the broader types of rationaliza-
tion that are available (Habermas 1984: 220). Thus, in seeing the
development of the state and of the economy as exemplary instances
of rationalization, Weber assumes that all other types of subsequent
cultural rationalization will have the same general properties. As
Habermas writes, ‘Weber did not hesitate to equate this particular
historical form of rationalization with rationalization of society as
such’ (ibid.: 221).
In particular, Weber misunderstands the rationalization of cul-
ture, which he treats solely as the decline of the ethic of brotherli-
ness and the institutionalization of separate spheres of artistic and
scientific rationality that are connected by no overarching morality.
178  f  Kevin W. Gray

Since moral-practical knowledge has not undergone the same pro-

cesses of rationalization that scientific knowledge has undergone,
Weber’s theory forces him to treat what moral-practical knowledge
is left over from the collapse of traditional worldviews as pockets of
irrationality that continue to exist in modern society (ibid.: 268 et
passim). In that way, Weber assumes from the outset that morality
in a modern structurally differentiated society is collapsed into dif-
ferent ethics related to different spheres of value, in which action is
guided by purposive-rational action designed to achieve those val-
ues. He does not recognize that the rationalization of each sphere of
value is institutionalized by means of the communicative potential
that is present in the modern lifeworld, or that the rationalization
of the lifeworld releases a larger underlying communicative compe-
tency that is possessed by all actors in the modern lifeworld, and that
could be used to legitimate the actions of the state in late-capitalist
democracies (ibid.: 303).
Second, Habermas argues that the failure to understand the emer-
gence of a broader potential for legitimation leads Weber to try to
show, falsely, that modern society can be distinguished from earlier
societies by its (almost pathological) reliance on legitimation through
procedure. In his work on bureaucracy, Weber describes how, in
capitalist society, social structures emerge with their own internal
rationality that allow for legitimation through procedure. A legal
decision or a government decision can be said to be well-arrived at if
the appropriate rules and procedures were respected.
Through the bureaucratization of society, modern rationality
emerges.
However, the rationality of systems, such as the economy and the
bureaucracy, is different in at least one important respect from the
rationality of an individual’s actions. A system is rationalized when it
adopts a series of processes to deal with potential problems as it tries to
accomplish the goals that define that specific organization. In that way,
Weber represents the actions of organizations ‘as a kind of purposive-
rational action writ large’ (Habermas 1984: 306). However, in Weber’s
work, the actions of an individual can be said to be rationalized when
both the goal decisions of the individual and his actions to accomplish
those goals move away from a religious worldview. From the perspec-
tive of action theory, therefore, individuals are unlike organizations
in at least one important respect: individuals do not have pre-defined
goals for which they adopt purposive-rational actions.
Thus, Habermas argues that Weber, in his discussion of bureau-
cratization, uses the term ‘rationality’ ambiguously to refer to two
 Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis  F  179

separate phenomena. It is used both to refer to the rationality of an

individual’s actions and to the rationality of larger sections of society
as a whole. As Habermas writes, the meaning of rationalization ‘shifts
unnoticeably from action rationality to systems rationality’ (ibid.:
307). Weber believes that there is no difference between the devel-
opment of structures of rationality inside modern bureaucracies and
the rationalization that occurs as a result of the death of worldviews.
Weber viewed these two types of rationalization as necessarily cou-
pled, whereas Habermas, rejecting this part of Weber’s view, argues
that it is merely contingent historic fact that they have emerged in
tandem.
Indeed, Habermas argues that these two processes of rationaliza-
tion must be decoupled. Weber claimed, largely as a result of his neo-
Kantian commitments, that in the modern world, the value choices of
the individual represented a form of irrationality. For him, the death
of traditional worldviews makes it impossible for the individual to
rely on any traditions in making decisions, and thus makes his or
her choices irrational. 3 However, some spheres of society have started
to rationalize (for example, science), while others have not. But for
Habermas, the rationalization of some spheres of the lifeworld (dif-
ferent from the rationalization of government) points the way to a
larger rationality that can be harnessed.
Habermas draws on this larger rationality in his third argument
against Weber, which focuses on the relationship between demo-
cratic legitimation and law. He argues that the model of rationali-
zation through procedure points the way to a model of ethics and,
ultimately, also of law in late-capitalist society. Law is the special case
that reveals the potential for communication to legitimate society. In
his work on democracy, Between Facts and Norms, Habermas adopts
a similar Weberian model of late capitalist society to that adopted
in The Theory of Communicative Action. But this time, he re-reads
Weber’s description of rationalization and secularization to theorize
the way in which the decisions of government in a late-capitalist soci-
ety can be legitimated.
Read as a proto-decisionist, Weber argues that religious norms
have been replaced by a plurality of worldviews, insufficient on their
own to justify the decisions of governments or to provide the steer-
ing functions necessary to control the growth of social systems, and

The use of the word ‘irrational’ is unfortunate in Weber, as it carries

3 

a wholly negative connotation in the modern world.

180  f  Kevin W. Gray

that law is just one of these many structurally differentiated subsys-

tems, defined by its own type of purposive-rational administrative
action. This modern detachment of law from an overarching reli-
gious worldview must be reinterpreted as the institutionaliza- tion
of cognitive-instrumental rationality. The multiplicity of different
spheres of action creates conflicts between validity claims at the cul-
tural level and conflicts between institutionalized action orientations
at the societal level — that is, conflicts of action. Weber refers to this
as the ‘new polytheism’ — reason splitting itself up into a plurality
of value spheres and thereby losing its unity (Habermas 1984: 247).
At the beginning of Between Facts and Norms, Habermas traces
this development to the familiar fragmentation of the life-world
into different realms: ‘Lifeworld certainties, which in any case are
pluralized and even more differentiated, do not provide sufficient
compensation for this [normative] deficit’ (1996: 26). The plural-
ity of logics and discourses inside the lifeworld denies law a strong
normative framework on which to hang its decisions. Moreover, the
fragmentation of the lifeworld results in the development of techni-
cal and scientific subfields of knowledge. Law’s task is to coordinate
between these different fields and the lifeworld proper. Habermas
disagrees with Weber’s assertion that law is merely the instantiation
of power and processes of social control with no relationship to dem-
ocratic legitimation. In Weber’s diagnosis of modern political ration-
ality, law is given a pre-eminent place as an example of the selective
rationalization of the lifeworld, law’s becoming a separate structure
making possible the institutionalization of purposive-rational eco-
nomic and administrative action, while detaching the function of
governing from its ethical base and from traditional moral structures
(Habermas 1984: 243).
Against Weber, Habermas argues that law can nonetheless inte-
grate society and appear legitimate only when it is seen as valid not
merely procedurally, but normatively. To that end, Habermas asks
both how law may be legitimated and how it might ‘secur[e] social
solidarity’ (1996: 74). His answer, of course, is that actors in the mod-
ern world possess the means of communication offered by modern
rationality, such that they are able to arrive at a mutual understand-
ing by means of mutually criticizable validity claims. In the modern
world, communicative action can provide legitimation for the political
system, based on the quest for mutual understanding as a mechanism
for action coordination. In that way, communicative action obtains
its ‘relevance for the construction and preservation of social orders’
(ibid.: 17). With the death of overarching religious worldviews, only
 Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis  F  181

communicative action — and not purposive-rational action — carries

with it the possibility of legitimation.
Thus, Habermas reinterprets the rationalization of law in light
of this new-found communicative potential, and argues that law in
the modern world need not develop as an autonomous subsystem.
Rather, law must be composed of facts — that is, a series of rights,
rules and so on that provide predictable outcomes — undergirded
by norms that are themselves justified through a process of legitima-
tion that can be accepted by all people. The central argument is that
law can only provide legitimation to the political system if the legal
system is itself properly legitimated. Habermas argues that out of the
ethical rationalization of modern society, a potential source of legal
rationalization emerges, to replace legitimation through overarching
religious worldviews with legitimation through communication.

What Must Change in the

Secularization Hypothesis?
In this light, it can be seen that the secularization hypothesis involves
three claims for Habermas. First, secularization is only possible
alongside rationalization. Second, the rationalization of society must
entail a decline in religiosity and religious frames of reference. Third,
secularization and rationalization mean that legitimation through
(appropriate) procedure derived from communicative action is the
only possible valid form of social legitimation (and that this mode
of rationalization differs from what was identified by Weber). On
Habermas’ telling, the truth of the first and second claims neces-
sarily entails that of the third. I will argue that the first and second
claims are suspect, but that the third is nonetheless true, and that it
is the only one that Habermas really requires in order for this broader
theory to work.
While Habermas’ interpretation of secularization differs from
Weber’s by focusing on rationalization, all of these three claims,
at first glance, still appear to depend on Habermas’ ability to show
that rationalization and secularization proceed hand-in-hand. Three
problems present themselves in this regard. First, historians have sub-
jected Weber’s account of secularization in Europe to a withering
critique. Second, the existence of continued patterns of religiosity
in the wealthy rentier states of the Middle East and in developing
economies in Asia, not to mention the continued strength of religious
belief in the world’s largest economy, the US, suggest that rationaliza-
tion and secularization need not be strongly coupled. Finally, statist
182  f  Kevin W. Gray

economies — in which there is little or no separation between state

and production, and thus little functional differentiation — continue
to be the norm in many relatively advanced industrial societies, such
as Russia and Saudi Arabia, rendering another part of the hypothesis
de facto incorrect. I will address the first problem in this section, and
the second and third in the following section.
In the first instance, historians’ criticism of Weber’s writings in
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism can be boiled down to
three challenges to the secularization hypothesis. First, in his work
on the Middle Ages, Philip Gorski provides an interesting survey of
the historical literature and argues that Weber has the secularization
hypothesis backwards. Several other historians echo this charge. For
instance, Jean Delumeau’s Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire,
Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic and Eamon Duffy’s
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580,
all argue that the Middle Ages were substantially less religious than
subsequent time periods, and particularly the Reformation, if by
‘religious’ one means a decline in magical and polytheistic explana-
tion and a rise in state monotheism (Delumeau 1977; Duffy 1992;
Gorski 2000: 139-45; Thomas 1971). Second, they argue that if the
term ‘religious’ means identification with a religious group, then it
is not clear that the population during the Middle Ages was in fact
more religious than under the Reformation (Gorski 2000: 146). For
instance, the historian Gabriel Le Bras argues that in the Middle
Ages, the Catholic Church, as an institution, was profoundly unpop-
ular with the populace and was viewed as a de facto agent of state
hegemony. He contends that it was only with the Reformation that
there emerged a popular Christianity in Northern Europe (Le Bras
1955-56: 267-301). Third, Gorski, who is otherwise pro-Weberian,
has argued that Weber’s use of the Netherlands as a case study is
not only misleading, but that Weber’s work also suffers from poor
historical scholarship. For example, while Gorski agrees that much
of the modern history of the Netherlands can be explained by the
rise of a predominant Calvinist bourgeois class whose values became
dominant during the rise of the bourgeois state, he notes that Prussia
provides a counter example to the hypothesis. There religious strife
existed between a Calvinist state and a predominantly Lutheran
populace and, if anything, it was the upper class, rather than the ris-
ing bourgeois class, that was responsible for introducing the Calvinist
work ethic (Gorski 2003: 112; Hsia 2005: 282). Only occasionally,
Gorski argues, is Calvinism from below a motor of secularization and
economic rationalization. In other words, Weber is correct to stress
 Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis  F  183

the role of Calvinism, but not to link it to the rise of the bourgeois
state and to the separation of the state from the economy.
If Weber’s hypothesis appears wrong about Europe, what should
become of it? A number of sociologists have addressed this question
and, to my mind, Mark Chaves and Peter Berger provide the most
compelling answer (Berger 1967; Chaves 1994: 754; Gorski 2000:
140). As Berger puts it, ‘by secularization we mean the process by
which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domina-
tion of religious institutions and symbols’. As such, secularization

affects the totality of cultural life and of ideation, and may be

observed in the decline of religious contents in the arts, in philoso-
phy, in literature and, most important of all, in the rise of science
as an autonomous, thoroughly secular perspective on the world
(Berger 1967: 107).

Of course, secularization has a subjective side as well — individuals

look upon the world without the benefit of religious frames of refer-
ence (ibid.: 108). Religion ceases to be a unifying force drawn on to
explain the world. In Habermas’ terminology, the lifeworld becomes
fractured and separated from an overarching religious worldview.
Additionally, the development of a religiously pluralist state leads
to the privatization of religion inside the private realm of the family
(ibid.: 133-35).4 Thus, the faults of Weber’s work occur around the
edges of what we hope to take away from the secularization hypoth-
esis. Instead of conceiving of secularization in terms of the decline of
religion, we should instead speak of a decline in the scope of religious
authority and the rise of a structurally differentiated modern capital-
ist society in Northern Europe.
What, then, should become of the secularization hypothesis in
Habermas’ work? In the first instance, it would perhaps be better to
rename the secularization hypothesis because, at least for Habermas’
project, what is most important is not secularization, but the fact

4 
Of course, even if Protestantism in particular may dramatically
reduce the scope of religious explanation, it is almost certainly true that
the disenchantment of the world may have roots prior to the Renaissance.
After all, as the historians discussed above have argued, the rise of a
monotheistic culture actually seems to eliminate the scope of religious
explanation, while postulating the existence of an all-powerful God who
acted outside the world (Berger 1967: 120).
184  f  Kevin W. Gray

that the death of overarching religious worldviews and the fragmen-

tation of the lifeworld lead necessarily to separate realms of culture.
In itself, this is perhaps not terribly interesting. However, the secu-
larization hypothesis also argues that secularization reveals a new
potential for legitimation. As we saw above, bureau- cratization in
Weber challenges society by substituting legitimation by religion
with legitimation through procedure. Even in Protestant societies
(which are at any rate not yet fully secularized), the internalization
of religion meant that social systems could develop because religion
no longer operated primarily at a social level, but rather at a personal
one. Religion becomes — as both Weber and Berger argue — a thor-
oughly private affair.
The new potential for legitimation first revealed itself through
the  secular public spheres that emerged in early capitalist Europe
in the 18th century. However, because Habermas paid scant ­attention
to the role of religion in the public sphere in Europe, adopting the
Marxist line that there was little difference between religion and the
aristocratic ruling group, he advanced — perhaps inadvertently, per-
haps not — the argument that religious belief was in some important
way incompatible with a robust public sphere.5 After all, the only
public spheres he studied existed separately from the aristocratic-
religious ruling groups.
However, it is not the case that religion has been excluded from
the public sphere in all societies in the West (even if one could per-
haps name many where this is true) and, moreover, it is certainly
not true about societies worldwide. As a claim about the death of
religion, the secularization hypothesis, as it relates to discourse in the
European public sphere, clearly fails. Nonetheless, because the secu-
larization hypothesis is also a claim about rationalization, I believe
that large sections of it — those most relevant for Habermas’ thought
— are still valid.

The Continued Relevance of Weber’s

Secularization Hypothesis
As Charles Taylor argues at the beginning of A Secular Age, there are at
least three different ways to understand the secularization hypothesis
(2007: 2-3; see also Butler 2010: 195). What Taylor calls ‘Secularism

5 
Habermas has recently attempted to rectify this failure. See, for
instance, Habermas 2011.
 Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis  F  185

I’ is the separation of religion from public spaces, where public spaces

are emptied of God or reference to religion. Put in a slightly weaker
form, separate realms of society emerge where goals internal to the
activity — such as those of economic activity, for example — emerge
that are rationalized without reference to religion. ‘Secularism II’ is
the claim that fewer people go to church (or the equivalent) and turn
away from God, while ‘Secularism III’ states that there has been a
move away from a society in which the belief in God is unchallenged,
to one in which religion is seen just as one option amongst several,
such that religion is not a point of reference for action coordination.
It should be clear from the foregoing that theses II and III are almost
certainly false. Fortunately, rather than affirming either of these the-
ses, Habermas’ secularization hypothesis actually requires a very weak
version of Secularism I.
First, I take it as a given that the rationalization of society is a phe-
nomenon universal to contemporary society the world over. Capitalist
means of production, which cannot exist without the phenomenon
Weber first identified as rationalization and bureau-cratization, thrive
worldwide. That is, while Weber may have been mistaken about the
coupling of rationalization and secularization, he was correct about
the coupling of rationalization and capitalism. Separate domains of
knowledge have developed worldwide inside the lifeworld, even if this
does not mean that governments will necessarily play a diminished role
in production, as Weber seemed to predict. To that end, Habermas’
claim about the rationalization of society continues, I believe, to hold
true. In fact, it is buttressed by the work of the historians and sociolo-
gists I cited above.
Second, it is an empirical claim as to whether or not rationaliza-
tion at the level of culture obtains worldwide. I believe it does and
that Habermas’ claim is supported by recent history, but this would
need to be verified by further empirical work. Still, for the sake of
argument, let us assume that it does. If the rationalization of the life-
world is an unavoidable fact of capitalist society, then old processes of
legitimation will necessarily lose their force, if not their presence in
the public sphere. Even those overarching religious worldviews that
remain will come face to face with steering problems brought about
by the structural differentiation of the modern world. In such cases,
the Habermasian model of legitimation through positive law provides
an answer to the problem at hand. Yet secularization is not the driv-
ing motor behind this development; rationalization is.
Third, virtually all modern societies, not just European societies,
are pluralist in some important way. The presence of different ethnic,
186  f  Kevin W. Gray

linguistic and religious groups is a de facto bar to the introduction

of most religious discourse into the public sphere, or at least, to the
introduction of religious claims based on overarching religious world-
views. Thus, while the Weberian claim about the death of religion
is invalid, other developments in late-capitalist society suggest that
large segments of the secularization hypothesis can be saved. Even
areas of the world where religion is more dominant in the public
arena are not unitary in terms of religion, either at the group or the
sub-group level, or in the interpretation of tradition. Similarly, the
extra-territorialization of belonging — involving diasporic groups,
citizens holding multiple citizenships, immigration, and so on — sug-
gest that old processes of legitimation will necessarily lose their force.
Fourth, it is important to note what the secularization hypothesis
is not a claim about. Strictly speaking, the claim is not that seculariza-
tion means an absence of religion, pace many readers of Weber, who
have missed this point. Rather, the secularization hypothesis claims
that as processes of disenchantment occur — such as in the transfor-
mation from Catholicism to Protestantism in Northern Europe, dis-
cussed by Weber — they will eliminate religious practices that serve
to integrate the community as a whole and reduce religion to the pri-
vate, intimate sphere. It seems to me that this claim, the most contro-
versial of the four, is not invalidated by the continuing religiosity of
the modern world, although there are some potentially problematic
counter examples, such as challenges to the teaching of evolution in
school systems both in the West and in the Middle East; scepticism
about theories of global warming; and re-Islamization in the Gulf,
particularly the re-Islamization that is driven by economic develop-
ment and seen, say, in the rise of an assertive and more overtly Islamic
middle class.
What, then, should we make of the existence of continued patterns
of religiosity outside the Western world and the continued coupling of
state and production in many relatively advanced industrial societies?
Do either of those problems invalidate the weak form of Secularism
I that Habermas needs to uphold to justify his argument? I believe
that they do not. Habermas’ version of Secularism I says merely that
as societies become more capitalist, the structural differentiation of
the lifeworld will strain the limits of any overarching religious world-
view. Even if the public sphere does not become secular, in the sense
that religious discourse disappears entirely from it, and even if a sys-
tem of capitalist production does not become separate from the state,
advances in knowledge will strain the integrating capacities of reli-
gious worldviews.
 Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis  F  187

Similarly, the presence of ethnic and linguistic minorities, increased

by processes such as immigration, will limit the integrating capacities of
such outlooks. Ultimately, rationalization will obtain, even if much of
the secularization hypothesis will not hold true.
It must be concluded, therefore, that reframing the secularization
hypothesis in terms of the rationalization of processes of legitimation
leaves most of what Habermas wants to stress intact. Nonetheless, the
secularization hypothesis must be revised to decouple the growth of
capitalism from the separation between the state and the economy, and
from the spurious claim that secularization leads to the death of religion.

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Hsia, R. Po-Chia. 2005. ‘Review of The Disciplinary Revolution’, Central

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Le Bras, Gabriel. 1955–56. Études de sociologie religieuse, vol. 1, Presses
Universitaires de France, Paris.
Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, vol. 1, Penguin, London.
Tarr, Zoltan. 1989. ‘Socialism, Revolution and Ethics: A Note on Weber
and Lukács’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 3(1):
131–39.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age, Harvard University Press,
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Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic, Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, London.
Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and
Other Writings, Penguin, New York.
9
Reason and Li Xing
A Chinese Solution to Habermas’
Problem of Moral Motivation
Tong Shijun

Jürgen Habermas’ idea of communicative reason provides him with

valuable resources in dealing with the problem of moral judgement
and countering moral relativism. Yet it seems to offer little help in
addressing the problem of moral motivation and particularly in resist-
ing moral nihilism, or what he has called the ‘defeatism of modern rea-
son’ (Habermas 2007). This chapter suggests that reading elements
of Chinese rationalism as interpreted by Liang Shuming (1893-1988)
into Habermas’ idea of communicative reason may provide a solution
to this problem without yielding too much to pre-modern traditions,
as some critics have suspected him of doing with his recent turn to
religions.

Is It Possible to ‘Derive from Reason any

Fundamental Argument against Murder’?
Habermas and the Problem of Moral Motivation
It may not be too much to consider Habermas’ theory of communi-
cative action as a response to Max Horkheimer’s remark about the
‘impossibility of deriving from reason any fundamental argument
against murder’, which Habermas once wrote had long irritated him
(2002: 96). Horkheimer’s scepticism towards reason is based on his
diagnosis of a process by which reason is ‘subjectivized’ and ‘for-
malized’ to the point that modernity finds itself in a state of ‘irra-
tional rationality’ or ‘rationalized irrationality’ (2004: 6, 61, 65).
For Horkheimer, the idea of rationality as the basis of contemporary
industrial culture thus contains ‘defects that vitiate it essentially’
(Horkheimer 2004: v) and that are reflected in the fact that

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-13
190  f  Tong Shijun

[i]n modern fascism, rationality has reached a point at which it is no

longer satisfied with simply repressing nature; rationality now exploits
nature by incorporating into its own system the rebellious potentiali-
ties of nature. The Nazis manipulated the suppressed desires of the
German people (ibid.: 82).

With his theory of communicative action, Habermas attempts

to maintain a moment of ‘transcendence’ — which is tradition-
ally associated with God, or what Horkheimer regarded as the
key to so-called ‘objective reason’ — by de-transcendentalizing
it, or turning it into something intersubjectively shared, rather
than something subjectively endowed. As he puts it in his essay,
‘Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World’, the
moment of ‘transcendence’ lies in ‘the general presuppositions of
communication, which — despite their ideal and only approxi-
mately realizable content — participants must in every case actu-
ally accept if they wish to thematize a controversial truth claim’
(2002: 107). By showing that ‘[p]ostmetaphysical thought differs
from religion in that it recovers the meaning of the unconditional
without recourse to God or an Absolute’ (ibid.: 108), Habermas
argues that in our ‘postmetaphysical’ age, reason in the form
of communicative reason ‘is by no means equally indifferent to
morality and immorality’ (ibid.).
However, Habermas sounds a note of caution immediately follow-
ing this remark, when he writes that ‘it is altogether a different mat-
ter to provide a motivating response to the question of why we should
follow our moral insights or why we should be moral at all’ (ibid.).
In a more recent discussion in An Awareness of What is Missing, he
expresses similar concerns, by claiming that ‘[p]ractical reason pro-
vides justifications for the universalistic and egalitarian concepts of
morality and law which shape the freedom of the individual and
interpersonal relations in a normatively plausible way’, but that ‘the
decision to engage in action based on solidarity when faced with
threats which can be averted only by collective efforts calls for more
than insight into good reasons’ (2010: 18-19).
In order to overcome this gap between moral reasoning and moral
motivation, in the ‘Transcendence’ essay Habermas seems to com-
bine a deontological perspective with elements of virtue ethics and
cognitivism with elements of moral psychology:

We acquire our moral intuitions in our parent’s home, not in school.

And moral insights tell us that we do not have any good reasons for
 Reason and Li Xing  F  191

behaving otherwise: for this, no self-surpassing of morality is neces-

sary. It is true that we often behave otherwise, but we do so with a bad
conscience (2002: 81).

That is, for Habermas, a right action is right not only because it fol-
lows the right rules of action, but also because it is conducted by
morally ‘right’ or virtuous persons, and much more than cognition
and argumentation is needed in order to cultivate the morally virtu-
ous personality. With this, Habermas even seems to complement his
secular morality with something from religion. As he puts it in An
Awareness of What is Missing,

Secular morality is not inherently embedded in communal practices.

Religious consciousness, by contrast, preserves an essential connection
to the ongoing practice of life within a community and, in the case of
the major world religions, to the observances of united global commu-
nities of all of the faithful. The religious consciousness of the individual
can derive stronger impulses towards action in solidarity, even from a
purely moral point of view, from this universalistic communitarianism
(2010: 75).

There are two problems with this solution to the problems of moral
motivation. First, it is more difficult in modern societies than it was in
traditional societies to connect Habermas’ claim that ‘we acquire our
moral intuitions in our parent’s home, not in school’ with his claim
that ‘[t]he religious consciousness of the individual can derive stronger
impulses towards action in solidarity’. For, compared with traditional
societies, moral education at modern homes is much less, if at all,
based on religions. Second, it is more difficult to discover the kind
of ‘religious consciousness’ that for Habermas can provide stronger
impulses towards action in solidarity ‘from a purely moral point of
view’ in religious traditions other than Christianity and Buddhism.
According to Habermas, Christianity and Buddhism ‘have achieved
a high level of internal rationalization in the course of their dogmatic
elaboration’ (Horkheimer et al. 2010: 78). Indeed, in order for a world
religion like Christianity to play a positive role in the public sphere
of the modern society, he claims that ‘[a] change in epistemic atti-
tudes must occur if religious consciousness is to become reflective and
if the secularist mindset is to overcome its limitations’ (Habermas
2008: 144). Habermas is clear about what Gunnar Skirbekk would
call the ‘asymmetry’ (Skirbekk 2006: 25) embedded in this and simi-
lar requirements, because he immediately adds that ‘these changes in
192  f  Tong Shijun

mentality count as complementary “learning processes” only from the

perspective of a specific normative self-understanding of modernity’
(Habermas 2008: 144).
Both problems touch upon the possibility of communicative reason’s
having a motivating force in modern and secular societies. Habermas
admits a very important role for religions in providing such a motivat-
ing force, on the condition that they undergo a ‘learning process’ that
satisfies the standards set by his conception of communicative reason.
But insofar as religious consciousness fails to ‘learn’, and so remains irre-
ducibly religious, its role in the public sphere of an increasingly modern
society can only be rather marginal, and this will be even more so in the
long run. It may even be doubted that religious consciousness can pro-
vide a motivating force after it has undergone a learning process char-
acterized by a self-understanding of modernity understood in terms of
communicative reason.
What, then, if there was a cultural tradition that both appeals to
our irrational feelings and is acceptable to our rational understand-
ings? In this chapter, I would like to suggest that the idea of ‘reason’
presented by the Chinese philosopher Liang Shuming expresses such
a tradition.

Liang Shuming on Li Xing: A Chinese

Conception of Reason
Liang Shuming argued for the crucial importance of the idea of ‘rea-
son’, or li xing, throughout his life. From his first book, Eastern and
Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921), to his most important
book, Key Principles of Chinese Culture (1949), until his last book,
China: A Country of Li Xing (1967-70), Liang argued repeatedly that
the most important distinctive feature of China is that it is a nation
of li xing.
The Chinese term ‘li xing as a modern academic term was intro-
duced via Japan, like many other modern academic terms. It is com-
posed of two Chinese characters, ‘li’, which means ‘reasons’, and
‘xing’, which functions like the English suffix, ‘-ness’. The term li
xing is the standard Chinese translation of the English word ‘reason’
or the German word ‘Vernunft’. Liang, who knew English well but no
German, emphasized that his discussion of li xing was derived from
Friedrich Engels’ discussion of 18th-century rationalism, and in par-
ticular from Engels’ association of socialism with the idea of reason
and its position in modern times.
 Reason and Li Xing  F  193

As the first step in reconstructing Liang’s understanding of ‘li xing’,

we may consider his interpretation of ‘li’ as one of the powers motivat-
ing human actions. Human beings, according to Liang, are motivated
by three things: huo li, or goods; wu li, or forces; and yi li, or reasons
(1991: 369). Although these three terms happen to sound similar in
spoken Chinese, insofar as they are all referred to as ‘li’, they are writ-
ten in different ways. Liang insists that there would be no harmony
among members of a society without reasons, or li in the sense of yi
li; that there would be no self-preservation against foreign invasions
without forces, or li in the sense of wu li; and that there would be no
human life if necessary goods, or li in the sense of huo li, were ever
lacking. Understood as motivating powers behind human interactions,
he sees a long-term historical tendency for reasons to become more
important than forces, or violence, and goods, or material interests,
and in his later years he argued repeatedly that socialism or commu-
nism is a society in which reasons finally prevail over forces and goods.
However, there are two types of ‘reasons’ for Liang. When reasons
exist in objective things, they do so independently of human feelings,
aspirations and wills and we know them through experiences. This
type of reasons can be called wu li, in its sense of ‘reasons or principles
of objective things’, rather than in the sense of ‘forces’ mentioned
above. In addition, there are reasons in our subjective feelings of aspi-
ration, will and preference, such as those regarding justice, fairness,
honesty, and loyalty. As Liang puts it,

It is when acting according to these reasons that one ‘feels at ease and
justified [xin an li de]’ and one ‘is assured and bold with justice [li zhi
qi zhuang]’.
This type of reasons can be named qing li, or reasons of human
feelings. The common Chinese saying, ‘having one’s head screwed on
the right way [tong qing da li]’, makes sense only with regard to human
beings and no other species of animals deserve this saying (Liang
1991: 364).

Liang holds that, corresponding to these two types of reasons, there

are two modes of reasoning, li xing and li zhi. Li zhi, literally mean-
ing ‘intellect’ or ‘mind’, is what differentiates human beings from
animals, which are motivated by instincts. Two major indications of
the importance of li zhi to human life are the fact that the human
species has language and the length of the infancy period of human
beings relative to that of other species. Thus, human beings have to
194  f  Tong Shijun

spend a long period learning knowledge composed of ideas expressed

in language in order to survive in the world. But li zhi is only a tool
for human life in the world; if li zhi works only in the service of one’s
instincts, then one’s life is not a human life in the strict sense. A
human life in the strict sense is one guided by li xing, rather than
by instinct. For Liang, this reflects the fact that only in human life
can questions of right and wrong arise. To live purely on the basis of
instinct is to act out of necessity, whereas human beings live in a gen-
uinely human way only when they can and should choose between
right actions and wrong ones. So here we can see not only the differ-
ence between li zhi and li xing, on the one hand, and instinct, on the
other, but also the difference between li zhi and li xing: while li zhi is
the ability to act according to reasons, especially reasons concerned
with material objects (wu li), li xing is both the ability and the willing-
ness to act according to reasons, and particularly reasons concerned
with human feelings (qing li).
‘Li xing’ in this sense displays itself in five particular ways, accord-
ing to Liang. First, li xing displays itself when people act according to
reasons. Liang writes,

It is often said that ‘humans are animals of li xing. Where is the so-
called ‘li xing’ to be seen? It is seen in the fact that one usually acts
according to reasons [li]. Li is what is referred to when we are reason-
ing, or what is common and consistent in different things (ibid.: 364).

Second, li xing displays itself when people are not willing to accept
their mistakes. This is actually the other side of the above point that
li xing displays itself when people act according to reasons.
Li xing is something that we are self-consciously endowed with,
so it shows itself most clearly when we make efforts against losing it.
Liang writes,

Li xing is . . . most evident in no other way than in the fact that we are not
willing to be reconciled to our mistakes. We commit mistakes when we
act in ignorance of reasons and contrary to reasons. Mistakes are imputed
only to human beings and not to animals. Dignity is not attributed to one
until one is capable of making mistakes and one deserves dignity most
when one is not willing to be reconciled with mistakes: this kind of self-
conscious upward aspiration is the most dignified thing (ibid.).

Third, li xing displays itself when people communicate with each

other smoothly. Since li xing is what we ultimately share with other
 Reason and Li Xing  F  195

people, there should be no obstacles in principle to communication

among people equally endowed with li xing. As Liang puts it in one
passage, ‘By so-called li xing I mean the kind of mental state of ours
which is calm and understanding. We can understand each other
most easily when we talk to each other, on whatever topics, calmly
and disinterestedly’ (Liang 1990a: 123).
Fourth, li xing displays itself when one has what Liang calls ‘imper-
sonal feeling’ (ibid.: 125). Crucially, this concerns — or, better, it is
itself — an expression of human feelings. But the human feelings con-
cerned are impersonal, or beyond particular persons. Li xing is pos-
sessed by particular individuals, but people of li xing are those who
see their lives as shared with other people. Since li xing requires that
one act according to qing li or reasons of human feelings, one should
regard one’s life as an end in itself, rather than a means to other ends,
and as inseparably connected with other people, from one’s loved ones
to humanity in general. Contrary to the supposedly Indian attitude of
world-negation and the supposedly Western attitude of world-domi-
nation, Liang argues, the Chinese attitude is that of world-affirmation
without world-domination, in the sense of enjoying a life shared with
one’s fellow human beings. He remarks, for instance, that Confucians
traditionally advocated a society based on ethical relations regulated
by moral codes and social rites because they are conscious of li xing, of
human life and of the fact that everybody is naturally inseparable from
the surrounding people and the surrounding world (ibid.: 136-37).
Finally, another important feature of li xing, corresponding to its
being ‘impersonal feeling’, is that its validity is both universal and
context-dependent. In Liang’s words, the validity of qing li is ‘derived
from the particular positions that each is situated in and cannot be
independent therefrom’ (Liang 1991: 459). He further writes,

We should know that whether a remark is reasonable or not depends

on who made this remark in the first place. Take for example a person
in a traditional family who has his parents above and his children
below. If he does his best for them dutifully and complains about
nothing though exhausted, then neither his parents nor his children
should blame him even if he sometimes fails to fulfil his obligations
satisfactorily. They would be unreasonable if they blame…. But if that
person blames himself he would prove to be an even more filial son
and an even more loving father (ibid.: 458).

That is, it is not possible to judge the validity of a certain expression

without considering by whom, to whom and in what form the expres-
sion is made.
196  f  Tong Shijun

Li Xing as ‘Spirit’ and ‘Reasonableness’

in Human Beings
It is worth comparing Liang’s distinction between li xing and li zhi
with conceptions of ‘reason’ more familiar in the Western philosophi-
cal tradition. Liang’s distinction is inspired by Bertrand Russell’s dis-
tinction between what he calls ‘spirit’ and ‘mind’. In his Principles
of Social Reconstruction, a book published shortly before his trip to
China in 1920, Russell writes,

The activities of men may be roughly derived from three sources, not
in actual fact sharply separate one from another, but sufficiently dis-
tinguishable to deserve different names. The three sources I mean are
instinct, mind and spirit, and of these three it is the life of the spirit
that makes religion (1916: 142).

Russell’s key claim is that ‘[t]he life of the spirit centres round imper-
sonal feeling, as the life of the mind centres round impersonal thought’
(ibid.: 158). He relates the life of spirit in this sense to religion, but
does not limit it to religion: ‘Reverence and worship, the sense of an
obligation to mankind, the feeling of imperativeness and acting under
orders which traditional religion has interpreted as Divine inspiration,
all belong to the life of the spirit’ (Russell 1916: 158). Liang accepts
Russell’s distinction between ‘spirit’ and ‘mind’, claims that his con-
ception of ‘li xing’ is close to Russell’s sense of ‘spirit’ and argues for
the quasi-religious role of ‘li xing’ in the life of the Chinese people.
But Liang disagrees with Russell’s idea that instinct, mind and spirit
are three parallel things existing side by side. For Liang, ren xin, the
human ‘heart’ or ‘mind’, is basically a unity, in which li xing and li
zhi are in a relation of ‘substance’ (ti) to ‘function’ (yong). Liang also
denies that his conception of li xing is equivalent to Russell’s ‘spirit’,
since for him li xing is related to li or reasons: while what is known by
li zhi is wu li or li of objective things, what is known by li xing is qing li
or li of human feelings. Qing li is also a kind of li and, as a more impor-
tant kind of li, it is inseparably connected with the self-consciousness
of the human mind: ‘Although all qing li must be seen in human feel-
ings, and therefore is dynamic instead of static, it is nevertheless not
an impulse; on the contrary it is no less than a kind of feeling that is
clear and self-conscious’ (Liang 1990b: 603).
Li xing in this sense is closer to another term used by Russell in
his The Problem of China, published in 1922, shortly after he returned
from his ten-month stay in China. This term is ‘reasonableness’ and
 Reason and Li Xing  F  197

Russell uses it, rather than the term ‘rationality’ associated with Max
Weber, to praise the Chinese mentality. He writes,

In art they aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable. There
is no admiration for the ruthless strong man, or for the unrestrained
expression of passion. After the more blatant life of the West, one
misses at first all the effects at which they are aiming; but gradually the
beauty and dignity of their existence become visible, so that the foreign-
ers who have lived longest in China are those who love the Chinese best
(1922: 189-90).

Russell proceeds to add that

[t]he Chinese are not, as a rule, good soldiers, because the causes for
which they are asked to fight are not worth fighting for, and they know
it. But that is only a proof of their reasonableness (ibid.: 197).

The contrast between ‘reasonableness’ and ‘rationality’ can be traced

back to Weber. The two words are, of course, English ones, and there
are no strict equivalents of them in German. Take, for instance, Karl
Marx’s remark in a letter to Arnold Ruge of 1843, ‘Die Vernunft hat
immer existiert, nur nicht immer in der vernünftigen Form’ (Marx and
Engels 1976: 345). Grammatically, it would be as correct to trans-
late this remark as ‘Reason has always existed, but not always in a
reasonable form’ as it would be to translate it as ‘Reason has always
existed, but not always in a rational form’. But the two translations
would be understood quite differently, at least in the modern context
after Weber. For, on the basis of his clear awareness of the distinction
between ‘Rationalität’, the German equivalent of the English word
‘rationality’, and ‘Vernünftigkeit’, which can be translated as either
‘rationality’ or ‘reasonableness’, Weber used ‘Rationalität’ almost
exclusively in his discussion of ‘occidentale Rationalismus’, the most
prominent feature of which is a growingly one-sided development of
Zweckrationalität, or instrumental rationality.1

1 
A search in Max Weber im Kontext. Werke auf CD-ROM reveals that
in Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, for example, the term ‘Vernunft’
occurs eight times, while the term ‘Rationalität’ occurs more than 130
times.
198  f  Tong Shijun

In recent years, various English-language philosophers have made

significant philosophical use of the different meanings of ‘ration-
ality’ and ‘reasonableness’, one of the most prominent being John
Rawls. In order to justify his principles of justice, he conceives of a
group of representative persons choosing among alternative princi-
ples of justice, in ignorance of their particular features and condi-
tions. For Rawls, the task of the political philosopher is to interpret
these choices by adjusting the moral theory and moral intuitions
for each other, in pursuit of a ‘reflective equilibrium’, and to justify
the chosen principles by interpreting these choices. The point is
that the justification thus arrived at is neither a mere opinion nor
an absolute truth. In Rawls’ view, in order for this kind of justifica-
tion to be successful, the hypothetical agents who choose between
alternative principles of justice must be rational, and their choice
must also be rational. At first, Rawls uses the word ‘rational’ to
refer to both the agents and their choices, but later, recognizing
that this suggests the Weberian concept of instrumental rationality,
he claims that what is important for justifying principles of justice
is not only that the choices made by those in the ‘original position’
are rational, but also that the people who make these choices are
‘reasonable’. He defines ‘reasonableness’ as follows: ‘Persons are rea-
sonable in one basic aspect when, among equals say, they are ready
to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and
to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will like-
wise do so’ (Rawls 1996: 49). In contrast, Rawls claims that

[t]he rational applies to how these ends and interests are adopted and
affirmed, as well as to how they are given priority. It also applies to
the choice of means, in which case it is guided by such familiar prin-
ciples as: to adopt the most effective means to ends, or to select the
more probable alternative, other things equal (ibid.: 50).

If ‘rationality’ is generally understood in terms of the end-means rela-

tion or as instrumental rationality, then ‘reasonableness’ should be
understood as referring to humanity as an end in itself in a Kantian
sense and its relation to the context of concrete human needs and
human conditions. Rawls’ distinction between ‘rationality’ and ‘rea-
sonableness’ is thus very close to Liang’s distinction between ‘li zhi’
and ‘li xing’.
However, while noting the affinities between Liang’s li xing
and Rawls’ and Russell’s ‘reasonableness’, in contrast with Weber’s
‘rationality’, Liang’s own explicit association of ‘li xing’ with ‘spirit’ in
 Reason and Li Xing  F  199

Russell’s sense should not be ignored. That is, for Liang, reasonable-
ness is not simply a kind of attitude, a mode of behaviour or a mode
of thinking typically cherished by Chinese culture, but is rather
something deeply inscribed in the heart of the Chinese people and is
thus ‘sacred’ in this sense. What characterizes Liang is his typically
Confucian efforts to give the sacred mentality of reasonableness a
secular explanation and justification, in terms of the fundamental
human conditions of interpersonal relationships in the family. Liang
quotes the following famous passage in Analects to express his view
in this regard:

Tsai Wo asked about the three years’ mourning for parents, saying
that one year was long enough. ‘If the superior man’, said he, ‘abstains
for three years from the observances of propriety, those observances
will be quite lost. If for three years he abstains from music, music
will be ruined. Within a year the old grain is exhausted, and the new
grain has sprung up, and, in procuring fire by friction, we go through
all the changes of wood for that purpose. After a complete year, the
mourning may stop’.
The Master said, ‘If you were, after a year, to eat good rice, and
wear embroidered clothes, would you feel at ease?’ ‘I should’, replied
Wo. The Master said, ‘If you can feel at ease, do it. But a superior
man, during the whole period of mourning, does not enjoy pleasant
food which he may eat, nor derive pleasure from music which he
may hear. He also does not feel at ease, if he is comfortably lodged.
Therefore he does not do what you propose. But now you feel at
ease and may do it’. Tsai Wo then went out, and the Master said,
‘This shows Yu’s want of virtue. It is not till a child is three years
old that it is allowed to leave the arms of its parents. And the three
years’ mourning is universally observed throughout’ (Analects: 17.21,
quoted in Liang 1991: 333).

After quoting this passage, Liang explains that, although

Confucianism as a school typically gives utmost importance to ritual
institutions, Confucius the Master allows his disciples to deliber-
ate over the meanings of these institutions. Different disciples may
have different opinions, some of them rather shallow, but rather than
denounce them abruptly, the Master points out the differences gently
and teaches disciples how to reflect and understand by themselves.
‘What a great and noble spirit of human reason [li xing] it is!’, Liang
enthusiastically remarks (1991: 333). Similarly, he claims that reli-
gious believers in China often believe primarily in the li or reasons
200  f  Tong Shijun

underlying religions, rather than in the religions themselves, a fact

which explains why in some small temples in China one can see idols
belonging to different religions (ibid.: 362).
Crucially, then, for Liang, reason can function in moral motiva-
tion as well as in moral argumentation only when it is part of one’s
heart as well as one’s mind. What is regarded as essentially important
by Chinese people in religions is what has been considered naturally
important in their everyday life across generations, which is largely
independent of the particular meanings attributed to each different
religion. Any statement about the outside world, even a religious one,
belongs to the category of wu li or li of material objects, rather than
qing li or li of human feelings. And this is just what Liang’s conception
of li xing implies. As emphasized above, Liang understands li xing as
qing li, or reasons of human feelings, and thus as distinct from wu li,
or reasons of objective things. He writes,

One should know that qing li is different from wu li. While wu li

exists objectively and independently from people, qing li comes from
the positions and relations that each is situated in and cannot be
independent therefrom. Those who take either the community or
the individual as something fundamental are fundamentally wrong
just because they overlook this fact and tend too easily to focus on
one of the aspects as the foundation; they require that people submit
themselves to either the community or the individual as external
forces or objective wu li instead of following one’s own heart from
within (Liang 1991: 458).

From ‘reason’ understood in Liang’s sense, it should not be too dif-

ficult to derive a ‘fundamental argument against murder’. Rather
than appeal to religion to avoid nihilism, as Habermas appears to
do, Liang shows how reason can be upheld by means of a conception
of it as both ‘reasonableness’, or qing li, and rationality, or wu li. In
other words, if for Horkheimer reason can no longer be objective
and should not be subjective and for Habermas reason is neither
objective nor subjective, but intersubjective, then for Liang, by con-
trast, li xing is neither purely objective, nor purely subjective: it
is something that is objectively and universally valid, but subjec-
tively and individually endowed. The strongest reason for one’s right
action, therefore, is not only objectively justified, but also subjec-
tively motivating.
 Reason and Li Xing  F  201

A Living Tradition of Li Xing Must

be Constantly Renewed
By saying that the Chinese tradition of li xing, or ‘reasonableness’ as
‘spirit’, as interpreted by Liang, can help provide a ‘fundamental argu-
ment against murder’, and thus solve the problem of moral motivation,
I do not mean that this tradition is the only such resource available or
that it can guarantee us a smooth process of modernization. It would,
of course, be quite unreasonable to claim that. Indeed, when Liang
was writing China: A Country of Li Xing from 1967 to 1970, the whole
country was undergoing the ‘Cultural Revolution’ that most people
now regard as a total denial both of reasonableness and rationality.
In the book itself, Liang spoke highly of the achievements China had
made under the leadership of the Party and Chairman Mao Zedong,
explaining these achievements and the wise leadership with reference
to the strong, albeit immature, tradition of li xing. Shortly afterwards,
in 1972, he also wrote an article praising Russell’s understanding of
Chinese culture, including its reasonableness, entitled ‘The Outsider
Sees the Most of the Game’ and subtitled ‘a review of the fact that
the British philosopher Russell foresaw the bright future of China
50 years ago’.2 Yet at the same time, on 31 March 1969, Liang noted
in his manuscript of China: A Country of Li Xing that ‘this book was
written under difficult conditions (for the materials that I prepared
were taken away and the reference books needed for writing the book
are lacking)’ (1991: 201). In a letter dated 13 July 1968, he even wrote
to Premier Zhou Enlai, asking Zhou to pass the letter on to Chairman
Mao Zedong and giving a detailed description of how he and his wife
had been mistreated by the ‘Red Guards’ (Liang 1993: 83-84). This
letter received no reply. Fortunately, the ‘Cultural Revolution’ ended
in 1976 and China has seen great economic and social progress since
then. This might be interpreted as evidence that the Chinese tradi-
tion of li xing or reasonableness has prevailed, but even if this is so, it
is necessary to ask why a nation with such a tradition could have suf-
fered such a lack of rationality and reasonableness and how this might
be avoided in the future.

Liang included this article as the preface to China: A Country of Li

2 

Xing, written between 1967 and 1970 and published posthumously in

1995.
202  f  Tong Shijun

Seen from this perspective, some recent developments in China

deserve serious attention. On 18 October 2010, the fifth plenary ses-
sion of the seventeenth Central Committee of the Communist Party
of China (CPC) passed the ‘CPC Central Committee’s Proposal for
Formulating the Twelfth Five-Year Program for China’s Economic
and Social Development (2011-2015)’, which aims ‘to promote sci-
entific spirit, strengthen humanistic concerns, pay more attention to
psychological counseling [xin li shu dao], and cultivate a social men-
tality that is enterprisingly progressive, peacefully li xing and toler-
antly open’ (People’s Daily 2010). From 21 April to 26 May 2011, the
major official newspaper People’s Daily published a series of com-
mentaries under the general title ‘Paying attention to social mental-
ity’ to explicate the implications of the demand to cultivate a li xing
social mentality. The titles of these articles give a general impression
of their contents: ‘Mentality Cultivation: A Test for Power Holders’,
‘Treating Heterogeneous Thinking with a Tolerant Mind’, ‘Resolving
the Mentality of Disadvantaged People with Fairness and Justice’,
‘Listening Attentively to the “Sunk Voices”’, and so on (People’s Daily
2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011e).
What deserves special mention is the fourth article in this series,
entitled ‘Where to Start the Efforts for Li Xing’, which argues that
the word li xing has become frequently used just because ‘many peo-
ple are turning to the opposite side of reason with regards to many
problems’. On the one hand, the article affirms that

our Party’s understanding of reason has achieved tremendous pro-

gress in the 30 years or so since the beginning of the reform and
opening up, as can be seen in the turning from the past pursuit of
a political rationality that is absolutely high and pure to the current
acceptance of an economic rationality favoring self-interests, compe-
tition and efficiency; the turning from the one-dimensional emphasis
on ‘being calm, stable, sensible and restrained’ to the efforts led by
the Party and the government to protect the interests of the masses,
cultivate and safeguard the public reason and construct a harmonious
society (People’s Daily 2011d).

On the other hand, the article points out that in a rapidly changing
country like China, which is facing ‘a turbulent situation unseen in
thousands of years’, no particular person ‘can venture to claim to be
the holder of the absolute truth and to enjoy an unsuitably high sense
of superior reason and expect to be able to heal the breach of “irration-
ality” with the symbol of “reason”’. The task of reason-construction
 Reason and Li Xing  F  203

at this moment therefore includes many aspects, and ‘the starting

point for cultivating a rational [or reasonable, li xing] and moderate
social mentality is to cultivate a communicative reason with equality,
truth, sincerity, and mutual understanding as the principles’. Highly
noteworthy here is not only that the notion of ‘communicative rea-
son [jiao wang li xing]’ is used explicitly, but that this notion is also
defined by the ideas of ‘equality, truth, sincerity, and mutual under-
standability’ familiar from Habermas’ work. 3
That the idea of ‘li xing’, or ‘reason’, and even ‘communicative
reason’, are so emphatically argued for in an article in People’s Daily
might seem surprising. This is particularly so given that in the eight
volumes of Mao Zedong’s Writings (Mao Zedong wen ji), li xing occurs
only once as a noun and there in a pejorative sense, in a note in which
Mao writes,

Humanity is a high stage of the development of matter, but not its

final stage; it will develop itself in the future and is not the so-called
god of everything. Human beings are first of all social animals, and we
should not follow the bourgeoisie in emphasizing the importance of
the xi ling of human beings (1996: 82).

However, this kind of crude materialist conception of li xing is for-

tunately only one of the intellectual traditions within the Chinese
Communist Party. What deserves special attention here, in my view,
is the position of Li Dazhao (1889-1927), one of the founding fathers
of the Chinese Communist Party, since he argued for a distinction
between the ‘general will’ (‘la volonté générale’) and the ‘will of all’
and for the formation of ‘la volonté générale’ on the basis of public, free
and reasonable discussions. Like Liang, Li Dazhao tried to appropri-
ate the cultural tradition of li xing in developing a Chinese version of
deliberative democracy. In an article written in 1923, for example, Li
quoted a famous remark by Mencius (372 bc-289 bc), a Confucian
scholar second in importance only to Confucius himself, to explicate
the meaning of ‘free consent’, which Li considered essential to genu-
ine democracy (1999: 119). Mencius’ remark is the following: ‘When
one by force subdues men, they do not submit to him in heart. They
submit because their strength is not adequate to resist’ (1992: 317).
When developing his sophisticated justification of a modern politics
legitimated by what Habermas would later call agreement ‘motivated

3 
Ibid.
204  f  Tong Shijun

solely by the unforced force of the better argument’ (1996: 306), Li

had already converted to Marxism, according to the official histori-
ography of the CCP.4 The recent efforts to integrate Marxism with
Confucianism and to construct a discursive democracy with ‘Chinese
characteristics’, may therefore gain strong support from a tradition
within the Party itself as well as within China’s philosophical herit-
age more broadly.

References
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a
Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass.
———. 2002. ‘Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World’,
in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, ed.
Eduardo Mendieta, Polity Press, Cambridge, 67–94.
———. 2007. ‘Ein Bewusstsein von dem, was fehlt: Über Glauben und
Wissen und den Defaitismus der modern en Vernunft’, Neue Zurcher
Zeitung, 10 February, https://www.nzz.ch/articleevb7x-ld.396917
(accessed 8 February 2022).
———. 2008. ‘Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions
for the “Public Use of Reason” by Religious and Secular Citizens’, in
Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 114–47.
———. 2010. ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in An Awareness of
What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 15–23.
Horkheimer, Max. 2004. The Eclipse of Reason, Continuum, London.
Li, Dazhao. 1999. ‘Democracy’, in Collected Works of Li Dazhao, vol. 4,
Hebei People’s Publishing House, Shijiazhuang, 114–33.
Liang, Shuming. 1990a. ‘Key Principles of Chinese Culture’, in Collected
Works of Liang Shuming, vol. 3, Shangdong People’s Publishing
House, Jinan, 1–316.
———.1990b. ‘Human Mind/Heart and Human Life’, in Collected Works
of Liang Shuming, vol. 3, Shangdong People’s Publishing House,
Jinan, 523–757.

4 
For a more detailed discussion of Li Dazhao’s views on democracy,
see Tong 2010.
 Reason and Li Xing  F  205

———. 1991. ‘China: A Country of Li Xing (Reason)’, in Collected Works

of Liang Shuming, vol. 4, Shangdong People’s Publishing House,
Jinan, 201–481.
———. 1993. Collected Works of Liang Shuming, vol. 8, Shandong People’s
Publishing House, Jinan.
Mao, Zedong. 1996. ‘On the Basic Features of Humanity and So On’, in
Mao Zedong’s Writings (Mao Zedong wen ji), vol. 3, People’s Publishing
House, Beijing, 82.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1976. Werke, vol. 1, Dietz, Berlin.
Mencius. 1992. ‘Mencius’, in Four Books in Chinese and English, trans.
James Legge, Hunan Publishing House, Zhengzhou, 260–555.
People’s Daily (ren min ri bao). 2010. ‘CPC Central Committee’s Proposal
for Formulating the Twelfth Five-Year Program for China’s Economic
and Social Development (2011-2015)’, 18 October.
———. 2011a. ‘Mentality Cultivation: A Test for Power Holders’, 21
April.
———. 2011b. ‘Treating Heterogeneous Thinking with a Tolerant Mind’,
28 April.
———. 2011c. ‘Resolving the Mentality of Disadvantaged People with
Fairness and Justice’, 5 May.
———. 2011d. ‘Where to Start the Efforts for Li Xing’, 19 May.
———. 2011e. ‘Listening Attentively to the “Sunk Voices”’, 26 May.
Rawls, John. 1996. Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New
York.
Russell, Bertrand. 1916. Principles of Social Reconstruction, Allen and
Unwin, London.
———. 1922. The Problem of China, Allen and Unwin, London.
Skirbekk, Gunnar. 2006. Religion, Modernity and Rationality: Shanghai
Lectures, SVT Press, Bergen.
Tong, Shijun. 2010. ‘The Idea of Democracy in the Intellectual History
of Modern China: A Discussion Mainly Based on Li Dazhao’s Texts’,
in The Problem of Modernity in the Dialogues Between the China and
the West, Xuilin Publisher, Shanghai, 227–64.
10
Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis,
Provincializing Habermas*
Péter Losonczi

The challenge is to reconceptualize the present.

Chakrabarty (2000: 249)
[A]nyone with any insight into the history of the term ... recognizes
that never is religion or the labelling of what is religious nonideological.
Ward (2010: 304)

This chapter forms part of a larger research programme, which aims

at a critical analysis of Habermas’ postsecular thesis. For reasons of
space, I will not be able to mention important elements of this pro-
gramme and I will merely refer to the alternative, ‘recontextualiza-
tion’ model that I intend to develop (see also Losonczi 2010). Here,
my concern is simply to explore the inadequacies of Habermas’ post-
secular thesis in the light of the new conditions brought about by
globalization, since I take it that, as Grace Davie has emphasized, this
thesis constitutes a remarkable response particularly to the changing
global environment (2010: 323).
1

*  This chapter is a revised version of a paper, ‘The Global Ambiguity

of Habermas’ Post-secular Thesis’, presented at the ‘Global Perspectives
on Habermas’ workshop at the University of Groningen in April 2011. It
also draws on presentations of my work on recontextualization given at
the University of Delhi, Ersta Sköndal University College in Stockholm,
LUISS University in Rome, and the University of Antwerp. I am indebted
to the audiences at these events and, for their comments on previous
drafts of the chapter, particularly to Tom Bailey, Maeve Cooke, Pieter
Boele van Hensbroek, Lieven Boeve, Herman De Dijn, Johan Garde,
Devrim Kabasakal, Aakash Singh, and Ajay Verma.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-14
 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis  F  207

The Postsecular Thesis: Global or Restricted Scope?

In a lecture given in Tilburg in 2007, ‘What is Meant by a “Post-
Secular Society”? A Discussion on Islam in Europe’, Habermas sets a
limited scope for the postsecular thesis, approaching the issue from a
sociological perspective. He writes,

[A] post-secular society must at some point have been in a ‘secular’

condition [. . . and therefore] this controversial term is only applicable
to the affluent societies of Europe or to countries such as Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand, where people’s religious ties have stead-
ily loosened, and quite dramatically since the end of the Second World
War (2009: 59).

Although he mentions what he describes as ‘a change in conscious-

ness’ generated by the new conditions, thus briefly taking a global
perspective, the sociological focus of the discussion leads to a restric-
tion in the applicability of the postsecular thesis. For the moment, I
would like to focus on this sociological component. In terms of the
sociological pillar of the thesis, only in the case of the just mentioned
societies does he find the term ‘postsecular’ applicable, insofar as
these societies adapt ‘to the fact that religious communities continue
to exist in a context of ongoing secularization’ (Habermas 2001b:
104).
At first glance, it would be easy to find good reasons for this
restriction. First, as Habermas argues, only these particular societies
were secularized formerly to the emergence of their postsecular con-
ditionality. Since, due to multiple factors, the presence of religious
communities is detectable within these societies, while the seculari-
zation process continues, the prefix ‘post’ is rightfully applicable to
the term ‘secular’ when we discuss the social and cultural contexts of
these societies. This is a seemingly empirical sociological thesis, and
its accuracy seems to be unquestionable.
However, there are important criticisms to put forward here. To
begin with, one may ask if this logic of restriction could be advanced
further. Such a procedure could radically reduce the applicability of
this thesis, or even collapse it into nonsense. We could introduce a
series of sub-divisions and end in the total disintegration of the post-
secular thesis itself, in such a way that the reductions would point
to the differences between the particular countries included in the
restricted circle of ‘postsecular societies’. Evidently, the differences
between the United States — a context Habermas does not classify
208  f  Péter Losonczi

under the rubric ‘postsecular society’ — and Europe are significant.

However, similarly relevant differences are easily detectable, for
instance, between the respective situations in France and Britain, Italy
and Finland, Greece and the Netherlands. What is more, although it
seemingly supports conceptual accuracy, such a restriction can easily
result in a theoretically unfruitful outlook in the sense that it hides
a number of dilemmas regarding secularization and its ambiguities,
instead of making them explicit and showing the complexities of the
context Habermas discusses in the Tilburg lecture. There seems to
be an interesting ambiguity concerning Habermas’ exploration of the
twofold — both global and restricted — character of the postsecular
thesis.
In fact, during the early 2000s this tension was not so evident.
Speculating about the political role of religion in the modern world,
which he treated also in terms of the problem of ‘multiple moderni-
ties’, Habermas presented a somewhat different position. In the speech
‘Glauben und Wissen’, presented in October 2001 as he was awarded
the Frankfurt International Book Fair ‘Peace Prize’, Habermas spoke
of the problems of what he terms postsecular societies. It this text, he
classifies the problem horizon of post-secularity in a much more flex-
ible sense, mentioning the terrorist attacks on the US and the ‘war
on terror’ declared by the US government as elemental factors in this
respect. He even embraces questions regarding human reproduction
as a related issue — a problem he engaged with substantially during
the last decade. In any case, the sociologically nuanced reduction is
not in function in this text (Habermas 2002a; cf. 2003). What is
more, in an interview of 2002, which he gave summarizing his short
visit to Iran, he mentioned the Iranian system as an example of these
developments. In these texts, he did not make a sharp division within
postsecularity and seems to subsume these complex issues under a
unified category (2002b).
All these early Habermasian reflections on the late modern resur-
gence of religion triggered furious criticism from Bassam Tibi (2002),
a former student of Habermas’. Tibi accuses Habermas of incom-
petence and naivety in view of his characterization of the existing
Iranian regime, and of a total misunderstanding of the roots of Islamic
fundamentalism and radicalism. According to Tibi, who character-
izes himself as a liberal Muslim, the marriage of religion and politics
can result only in a harmful neo-absolutism, since ‘[t]he meaning of
religion is intrinsic to fundamentalism and also to political Islam’
(Tibi 2002: 280). Tibi not only subscribes to the Huntingtonian the-
sis of a clash of civilizations, but also claims that it was already rightly
 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis  F  209

forecast by Raimond Aron and others (ibid.: 275). According to him,

due to their respective visions of a cosmic order, these religious tradi-
tions (he mentions Islam and Hinduism) are incapable of implement-
ing an image of reality necessary for the operation of a democratic
political and social system (ibid.: 276-77). Limits of space make it
impossible to discuss the reductionistic and oversimplifying charac-
ter of Tibi’s approach, which may well be an example of what Akeel
Bilgrami (2003) calls a clash within civilizations, rather than a clash
of civilizations. In any case, Tibi’s reaction well symbolizes the shock
that Habermas’ shift generated among liberal secularists.
This early reaction may have played a role in the modification of
Habermas’ thesis, insofar as it seems to differentiate aspects within
the postsecular thesis and tries to dissociate itself from a more general
and compound scenario of the politico-religious scene in global terms.
From this perspective, it seems as if he tried to revise the direct con-
notations of postsecularity as a sociological reduction. Nevertheless,
he keeps a more flexible category of postsecular consciousness in
function. Discussing the problem of postsecular consciousness, he
steps beyond the socio-logical data and, not independently of Jose
Casanova’s theory on public religions, examines the problem with an
eye to global developments (2009: 63). It seems that in the Tilburg
lecture, the two dimensions are related to one another in such a way
that the sociological focus is given a determinant role, and the more
flexible perspective with its global connotations is emphasized only
insofar as it can contribute to the treatment of the context of ‘post-
secular societies’ in the restricted sense. I will devote more atten-
tion to this problematic shift in a subsequent section. However, I
would first like to focus on another aspect of the dilemmas regarding
Habermas’ postsecular thesis. It is important to see that, notwith-
standing the inclusive attitude of the postsecular thesis towards reli-
gious traditions in conditions of modernity, Habermas subscribes to
a reformulated version of the secularization theory. Since this factor
will play an essential role in my final analysis, I would like to discuss
it in more detail.

Habermas and the Restatement of

the Secularization Theory
In the Tilburg lecture, Habermas declares that although the socio-
logical explication on the secularization thesis needs certain revisions,
‘the data collected globally still provides surprisingly robust sup-
port for the defenders of the secularization thesis’ (2009: 62). This
210  f  Péter Losonczi

remark implies the admission of an altered form of the secularization

theory. It is important to see that in this comment, Habermas relies
on the perhaps most characteristic contemporary representatives of
the secularization theory, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2004;
see also 2007).
In defence of the secularization thesis, Norris and Inglehart argue
that the increasing political salience of religion does not at all indi-
cate an overall growth in religiosity in Western societies, especially
in Europe. In their revised model of the secularization thesis, its deci-
sive indicative factor is the extent to which people have a sense of
‘existential security’ within particular societies. By ‘existential secu-
rity’, they mean the strength of the feeling that survival is safe enough
to be taken for granted (Norris and Inglehart 2004: 4). As they note,
this secularization theory thus draws neither on the Weberian the-
sis about the rationality of belief systems nor on the Durkheimian
theory of functional differentiation (ibid.: 217), the two main sources
of the original Habermasian secularization theory. Habermas none-
theless finds this alternative appeal to ‘existential security’ convinc-
ing. Notwithstanding his postsecular sensibilities, then, he remains
an advocate of the secularization theory.
However, as critics convincingly argue, the Norris-Inglehart pro-
posal has significant shortcomings, both methodologically and con-
ceptually. As Casanova has explained in a recent article, this model
proves inappropriate when one attempts to explain many of the
remarkable differences among the processes of secularization in dif-
ferent developed societies (2009). Another problematic point is that
the Norris-Inglehart theory cannot account for the dynamic transfor-
mations occurring within contemporary religious contexts. Thomas
Banchoff emphasizes that the Norris-Inglehart thesis is incapable of
accounting for the intensive presence of religious sensibilities outside
the framework of a traditional mode of religiosity (Banchoff 2007:
7).1 However, the situation is even more complicated. In fact, my

1 
On this problem, see also Taylor 2007 on what he calls post-Dur-
kheimian social forms; Boeve 2005, 2007; Hohn 2007; Sweeney 2008;
Ward 2009; Woodhead 2004 and the different approaches presented
in Flanagan and Jupp 1999; and Hoelzl and Ward 2008. Although the
remarkable transformations in the meaning of the term ‘religion’, and
the specific cultural origins of this term, should not be neglected, I think
the concept can be employed here without a more precise definition, as
referring to a family resemblance.
 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis  F  211

view is that Norris and Inglehart work with a debatable concept of

religion, as well as a questionable notion of secularization. This leads
them not only to exclude reflection on more general cultural-theoret-
ical or philosophical contexts, but also to neglect important develop-
ments within the lifeworld of traditional religions themselves.
Norris and Inglehart define secularization as a process that brings
about systematic cultural changes, ‘diminishing the importance of
religion in people’s lives and weakening the allegiance to traditional
cultural norms, making people more tolerant of divorce, abortion,
homosexuality, and cultural change’ (2007: 47-48). Therefore, secu-
larization would involve certain cultural changes that bring about the
erosion of traditional norms. Nevertheless, this apparently descrip-
tive assertion implies crucial normative statements about seculariza-
tion and religion alike. In their reading, secularizing tendencies would
basically embrace ‘progressive’, ‘modernizing’, ‘tolerant’, ‘emanci-
pating’ tendencies, while religion would represent their antithesis.
In other words, they implicitly contest Casanova’s thesis about the
divorce between modernization and secularization. This selective
identification of secularism with certain forms of cultural change,
and the accompanying negligence of other forms of cultural change
that imply the transformed persistence of religion, is an equally ques-
tionable strategy. Norris and Inglehart simply neglect those cultural
transformations that are describable by the vocabulary they use in
characterizing secularization, but belong to the internal formation of
religious traditions.
Considering this, it is not surprising that Norris and Inglehart
fail to notice the complexities of contemporary religious traditions.
Should the religious convictions of the Canadian Muslim Irshad
Manji (2003) be regarded as less authentic in view of her deep-seated
appeal for a rethinking of many — equally deep-seated — traditional
mentalities of Islam? Similarly, would John Milbank, a leading theo-
logian of the Radical Orthodoxy movement and a harsh critic of lib-
eralism and modernity, be less authentically Christian in asserting
that there ‘need be no problem whatsoever with the idea that homo-
sexual practice is part of the richness of God’s creation’ (2003: 207-
8)? A normative evaluation of these propositions is possible only on
theological grounds. In a descriptive assessment of these opinions, it is
hard to cast doubt on their religious character — despite the fact that
they counter the scheme applied by Norris and Inglehart. Manji and
Milbank’s positions are exemplary cases of the internal pluralization
of the contemporary traditional religious landscape of Western socie-
ties, while Norris and Inglehart work with an essentialist conception
212  f  Péter Losonczi

of religion and regard religious traditions as if they were, to use Gerd

Baumann’s phrase, finished objects (1999: 83).
Furthermore, as other studies convincingly show, even the nexus
between traditional-institutionalized forms of religious life and the
surrounding societal context has undergone certain modifications.
This also implies that we need to speak of the transformation and
complexity of religions, instead of a pure and simple evaporation.
As Max Pensky describes, in European civil societies (not including
France, where the political religion of laicism enjoys a dominant posi-
tion), ‘privatized faith is complexly connected to a mediated, indirect
participation in public church institutions taken as a form of pub-
lic, quasigovernmental institution’ (2008: 154). Further, as Pensky
and Habermas both acknowledge, immigration means that Islam and
other religious traditions should be considered contributors to the
vibrant religious pluralism of West-European societies. This new fac-
tor makes the situation even more complex. These communities col-
our both the religious pluralism and the confessional diversity of this
religious institutional segment of civil society. Similarly, divergent
groups within the so-called new religious movements form another
layer of this pluralizing landscape.2 Although Pensky’s main concern
is how to interpret the public role of religion within the European
context, his remark bears relevance for this study too. For the sig-
nificance of his approach lies in the fact that it recognizes that this
transformative dynamism is not merely detectable culturally, but
expresses itself socially too.
All this is not to say that certain trends of decline in religious
influences or even anti-religious sentiments are absent in the
Western or European sociocultural context. It is rather to pinpoint
the complexity and complicated nature of the situation, and how the
Norris-Inglehart proposal can be easily challenged (see, for instance,
Brown 1992; Casanova 2007: 65; Hadden 1987). Consequently,

2 
It is worth mentioning that following the political regime change
of 1990 in Hungary, the Krishna movement gained a strong influence
among the post-traditionalistic religious groups, turning the country into
a centre of the global Krishna community. Although at first the move-
ment’s presence triggered arguments on a political level, and even led to
certain legal restraints on these and other ‘destructive sects’, the legal
discrimination was later lifted and in time, the community gained a gen-
eral acceptance, due in part to their social work and their active involve-
ment in the cultural and religious life of the country.
 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis  F  213

drawing on the conclusions of a study of the secularization theory

by James Beckford (1989: 171), I propose to conceptualize religions
primarily as a cultural resource or form, and not as a social institu-
tion . This means that despite the decline of religious monopolies
in Western societies, religion reappears in a variety of forms and
in combination with a number of new purposes. This permutated
variety of the different manifestations of religious consciousness can
be addressed with a great degree of flexibility and unpredictability
if we approach it from a cultural hermeneutical perspective, which
may even reconfigure the interpretative arsenal of sociology (see
Hoelzl and Ward 2008; Sweeney 2008). However, as we have seen,
this new constellation by no means necessitates the total disappear-
ance of institutional ties — one can also think of Davie’s conception
of vicarious religion (2000, 2010). In fact, as Beckford declares, this
situation is not really conceivable in terms of the sociological classics
(1989: 172).
It is a most striking fact that while Habermas embraces Casanova’s
claim concerning the role of public religions in modern contexts and
the resulting distinction between modernization and secularization,
he at the same time follows the Norris-Inglehart thesis and accepts
a new version of the zero/sum theory. As we have seen, Casanova
himself finds the Norris-Inglehart thesis problematic.
This dubious Habermasian gesture therefore further complicates
the already difficult status of the sociological component of the post-
secular thesis.
I explain all this not because I want to reject the postsecular the-
sis in a more general sense. On the contrary, I would like to argue
for a much more complicated diagnosis of the postsecular condition.
In this regard, it is worth considering the caution of an Indonesian
intellectual, Goenewan Mohamad, who claims that both secularism
and religion have nine lives (2007: 161). Describing the difficulties
of the postsecular constellation, he insists that ‘[o]ne cannot always
mark the border between religious and rational, between faith and
freedom, between the power of the sacred and of human will . . .
[since a] clean break never exists . . . [and what] is taking place is
more open-ended, often tumultuous’ (ibid.). In my interpretation,
the European postsecular scene is a version of this tumultuous global
postsecular scenario. The European context and its components can-
not be appropriately interpreted in line with the logic of the secu-
larization theory.
My proposal is that Habermas’ reflections on the problems con-
cerning postsecular consciousness are more promising when it comes
214  f  Péter Losonczi

to theorizing the consequences and challenges of the postsecular situ-

ation. In other words, I propose that we read Habermas’ postsecular
thesis with an emphasis on the second pillar of this theory, namely,
that related to the history of mentality. This is what Habermas dis-
cusses under the category of ‘postsecular consciousness’. This may
turn out to be a mode of examining ‘the intersections between the
formation of new interpretations of religiosity in the complexity of
modernity and the complexity of meaning formation itself’, as John
Rundell has proposed (2010: 28). At the same time, this shift ren-
ders it possible to critically examine whether Habermas’ postsecu-
lar thesis aptly reflects upon the dual globalizing perspectives of the
European religious scene. In other words, it should be examined
whether Habermas properly addresses the challenges that arise from
the presence of immigrant religious communities, on the one hand,
and aptly deals with the religio-cultural and religio-political develop-
ments of the contemporary global situation, on the other. Obviously,
in this case I will focus on traditional religious groups and individuals,
rather than post-traditional forms of religiosity.

Postsecular Consciousness
In a recent interview, Habermas himself explains that the concept
‘postsecular’ serves not as a genealogical, but as a sociological predi-
cate in the description of those modern societies that have to live
with the continued existence of religious communities and the con-
tinued weight of different religious traditions, even if the societies
themselves are principally secularized (Mendieta 2010: 3). However,
he adds that ‘insofar as I describe as postsecular not society itself, but
a corresponding change of consciousness in it, the predicate can also
be used to refer to an altered self-understanding of the largely secular-
ized societies of Western Europe, Canada, or Australia’ (ibid.: 3-4,
emphasis mine). He further claims that with this latter connotation,
‘“postsecular” refers, like “postmeta- physical”, to a caesura in the his-
tory of mentality’ (ibid.: 4). In my view, this terminological innova-
tion is important because it dissociates the applicability of the term
‘postsecular’ from the otherwise ambiguous European sociological
context, making it relevant for the interpretation of developments on
a global scale.
This transition from a predominantly militant secularist attitude—
what he defines as a polemical stance against religion (Habermas
2009: 74)— to the acknowledgement of the vibrant presence of
 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis  F  215

different religious traditions provides us with a more complex frame-

work for reflection on the contemporary situation. It is an appropriate
conceptual model to the extent that it can help us in dissociating the
theoretical problem-horizon of the post-secular debate from a vague
and debatable sociological pattern. This is an extremely important
shift also because it opens up a much more complicated and rich field
of study, where various thematic and disciplinary elements can be
brought together in a combined analysis. A most important advan-
tage of this model is that it can include a couple of questions concern-
ing the situation of our ‘interdependent world’ (cf. Parekh 2010: 165)
which could fall outside the perspectives of the sociological version.
My proposal is that we divorce this element from the sociological
one, and render it the central component of the discussion of the
postsecular situation.
Nevertheless, whether the specific way in which Habermas him-
self operates within this field is sufficient, or whether it generates fur-
ther difficulties vis-a-vis the appropriateness of the postsecular thesis
in his version, is another question altogether. In fact, I think that
notwithstanding these efforts by Habermas, important shortcomings
remain, which make the fulfilment of this programme vulnerable
to criticism. On the one hand, similar to — but not due to — the
attitude of Norris and Inglehart, Habermas neglects a couple of the
complexities of the contemporary situation. As we have mentioned,
Norris and Inglehart absolutely neglect the internal variance of reli-
gious traditions. Similarly, notwithstanding some nuances, Habermas
works with rather simplistic terms. Although he reflects on what he
depicts as the modernization of religious consciousness (Habermas
2008: 136), he seems to be unaware of the real internal cultural and
intellectual pluralism of these traditions. Neglecting these complexi-
ties, he is destined to speak of these traditions in essentialist terms,
and thereby fails to acknowledge alternative modes of accommo-
dating the pluralistic conditions of modernity and the postsecular
constellation.
In similarly essentialist terms, he speaks of the new challenge
that ‘Islam’ poses in Europe. First, he neglects the extensive pres-
ence of indigenous Muslim communities living on the continent, in
Bosnia and elsewhere in the Balkans, a fact that would be important
to consider when speaking of ‘Islam in Europe’. Neglecting the exist-
ence and possible contribution of these communities to an overall
framework for accommodating Islamic citizens and communities in
the ‘rest’ of Europe is a fundamental defect of the Western attitude.
216  f  Péter Losonczi

Furthermore, the Muslim community is not a homogenous body,

either globally or in Europe. The divergent communities with their
various cultural, geographical, ethnic, and doctrinal backgrounds
make up a very diverse universe and this diversity carries essential
socio-political implications. This neglect of the internal variance of
the global Muslim community has serious consequences.
The same form of internal variance applies to religious traditions
in general. The simplifying secular-religious dichotomy is unable to
reflect on and express the complexity and difficulty of the situation,
its prospects and challenges alike. In this situation, what we need to
instigate is, adapting John Rawls’ words, an omnilogue, instead of a
dialogue (2005: 383). The internal pluralism of particular religious
traditions has not only influenced the internal lifeworlds of these
communities, leaving the ‘secular’ environment unchanged; there is
also an intensive exchange among these participants, and this brings
about a much more complicated constellation than can be described
according to the secular-religious dichotomy. The dichotomous
model adapted by Habermas is insufficient for the inclusion of the
variety of possible stances. This pluralism, at the same time, has sig-
nificant effects on the political setting of postsecular societies.
However, Habermas’ dichotomization is an essential manifestation
of modern secularism, which fails to acknowledge the specific reli-
gious sources of a cultural creativity that in fact generates not contes-
tation, but the acceptance or even the celebration of other faiths (cf.
Nandy 2003: 51). Habermas remains negligent of the fact that there
are alternative ways of liberating ourselves from what he describes as
the immediacy of the events and occurrences of the world, and thus
gaining intentional distance from the world (cf. 2010a: 83), a capacity
that he repeatedly reserves exclusively for Enlightenment philosophy.
The elemental global ambiguity of Habermas’ postsecular thesis lies
precisely in its serious shortcomings with respect to this possible multi-
plicity of sources, and the variability of the epistemic conditionality of
the ‘inclusion of the other’.
This dualistic pattern is, in fact, the expression of a twin dichot-
omy. This is fundamental for Habermas: the distinction between reli-
gious stances and the allegedly neutral, universalistic Enlightenment
philosophical position that he renders paradigmatic. Of course, this
is closely related to the exclusion of faith from the cognitive reper-
toire of public discourse, a restriction that Habermas maintains even
while reformulating it. It is important to mention that the classical
reason-faith dichotomy is derived from the cultural and cognitive
backgrounds of monotheistic religions. Those forms of knowledge
 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis  F  217

that characterize the other traditions are not easily subsumable under
this conceptual scheme. However, the dichotomy itself, as well as
Habermas’ insistence on the alleged impartiality of Enlightenment
rationality, implies that this sense of rationality is drawn into a contra-
distinction with all other forms of knowledge. This dichotomization
is confirmed in the previously quoted interview. There, when asked
about the consequences of his postsecular turn for the Eurocentric
implications of the secularization theory, especially the cognitive
ones, he laconically warns that ‘we should not throw out the baby
with the bathwater’ (Mendieta 2010: 2).
Although Habermas explains that an envisioned global cultural
dialogue should result in a discourse in the course of which ‘all par-
ticipants must be willing to be enlightened by others about their
respective blind spots’ (Mendieta 2010: 2), one wonders whether he
would acknowledge that the exclusive favouring of Occidental ration-
alism may be described as such a blind spot in itself. He tries to argue
that secular reason is capable of a self-reflection that saves it from its
own prejudices, implying that this form of knowledge is the only one
capable of full self-understanding (2010a: 80), while also being able
to assist other forms of knowledge in their own reflective endeavour.
However, this is a rather dubious claim. Similarly, elsewhere he is
convinced that ‘the universalist task of the political Enlightenment
not at all contradicts the particularistic demands of multicultural-
ism, provided that the latter is understood in the correct way’ (2009:
68, emphasis mine). 3 The multicultural situation is to be addressed
by the condition that the Enlightenment programme secured, and
the respective consequences of the postsecular condition are to be
addressed similarly. This demand makes it clear that in the eyes of
Habermas, no alternative modes for the fulfilment of the main tasks
of the Enlightenment project are possible.
It is evident that in the postsecular phase of his intellectual pro-
gramme, Habermas in a certain way replicates a previously controver-
sial feature of his theory of communicative action. This insufficiency
resides in the neglect of alternative forms of communication and it
renders the global ambiguity of his project a serious one. The postsec-
ular thesis does not surpass this exclusive adoption of post-Enlighten-
ment rationality as the master principle of communication, and so, as

3 
For Habermas’ recent reflections on multiculturalism, including
his criticism of Angela Merkel’s infamous remarks about its death, see
Habermas 2010b.
218  f  Péter Losonczi

in former versions of communicative theory, ‘learning processes are

conceived only in terms of one cultural model, namely Occidental
modernity’ (Delanty 1997: 42). This outlook also limits the access
of Western conservative-traditionalist attitudes to discourse, while
these positions rightfully demand a say within the general political
arena (De Dijn 2006; Eberle 2002).
Therefore, not only the sociological aspects of the postsecular
thesis, but also the basic philosophical framework of Habermas’
programme regarding the problems of postsecular conscious-
ness are designed on the basis of a post-Enlightenment vision.
Habermas’ idea concerning the rational untranslatability of certain
religious meaning contents is conditioned by a temporal index of
provisionality (see Loobuyck and Rummens 2010: 73). According
to his Postmetaphysical Thinking, the coexistence of philosophy
and religion in the modern context still implies a limitedness of
Enlightenment rationality. But even here, he implies that this lim-
itedness is only provisional (Habermas 1992: 51). In any case, the
formerly expounded temporal conditionality of religious meanings’
untranslatability and the demand for rational translation, along
with the political admittance of religiously motivated arguments,
together suggest that he still interprets rationalization — and by
that he means secularization — as a continuous procedure. The
final word in the dialectical manoeuvre seems to be seculariza-
tion, or rationalization in the sense of Enlightenment philosophy.
According to Vincent Pecora’s diagnosis (2006), Habermas fails to
realize that rationalization may be a project that can by no means
be fully completed.4
Therefore, Habermas’ theses on rationalization can be unveiled
as a remnant of secularism. As the theologian Nigel Biggar argues,
the postsecular thesis and its respective proposal for the inclusion of

4 
Peccora argues that Habermas fails to see that secularization is
‘something bound to take a more circuitous, partial, and uneven path,
one filled with digressions that periodically call its basic . . . premises
into question, and that may provide, both for good and ill, a powerful
resistance to any attempt to finish once and for all ... the “project” of
rationalized modernity’ (2006: 22). This comment of Pecora’s can be
interpreted as complementary to Mohamad’s note on the tumultuous
nature of the postsecular condition. Elsewhere, I have argued that this is
so because Habermas is not able to address the essential ambiguity inher-
ent in religion (Losonczi 2010).
 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis  F  219

religious citizens in democratic political discourse are still worked out

under the vision of an Enlightened supremacy, and reflect the worst
modernist prejudices against religion (2009: 169). The same goes for
Habermas’ approach to relevant questions concerning the global per-
spectives of this thesis. According to Habermas, ‘global modernity
looks like an open arena in which participants, from the viewpoints
of different paths of cultural development, struggle [streiten] over the
normative structuring of social infrastructures that are more or less
shared’ (Mendieta 2010: 9).
However, as he makes clear, the language games that come
together in this arena are subsumed under the scope of Occidental
rationalism: ‘we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater’.
As Anne Fortin-Melkevik rightly put it in an article published before
Habermas’ postsecular shift, the ‘tendency to the rational’ is the
essential moment in Habermas’ approach to secularization (1992:
60). The previously mentioned temporal indexation of the untransla-
bility of religious meaning contents makes it evident how the tenden-
tious logic of rationalization/secularization persistently determined
his thought. This tendentious logic is kept intact even after the post-
secular shift.
Despite his most recent explications of the postsecular thesis in
terms of postsecular consciousness, Habermas remains within the
scope of what, in Casanova’s terms, we can call ‘stadial conscious-
ness’, or ‘the Enlightenment premise that humanity and human soci-
eties undergo progressive stages of development’ (2009: 12). The
stadial outlook of this way of thinking is essentially linked with a tel-
eological vision on rationalization. This element I depict as an evident
secularist remnant in Habermas’ thought, influential even in its most
recent postsecular phase. However, this fact leads to the question:
Is Habermas’ conception able to adequately address the challenges
of the multidimensionally pluralistic situation and initiate what we
might call a ‘global omnilogue’? From this diagnosis, it follows that
we need to recontextualize the dichotomously framed Habermasian
theory and develop an appropriate model for the discussion of the
consequences of the postsecular context, both in Europe and globally.

Recontextualization: Radicalizing the

Problem of Postsecular Consciousness
Notwithstanding my criticism of Habermas’ treatment of the emer-
gence of the postsecular consciousness, I find this aspect of his theory
promising. In concluding my discussion, I would like to propose a
220  f  Péter Losonczi

critical and radical restatement of this particular aspect of the post-

secular stance. In this regard, I will introduce an important concept
— namely, recontextualization — that I borrow from the Belgian theo-
logian, Lieven Boeve. Boeve’s work aims at the reformulation of the
Catholic attitude towards the non-Catholic modern, or postmodern,
environment. He introduces the notion of recontextualization in
a discussion of the post-Vatican II Catholic strategy regarding the
Church’s nexus with modern conditions. Following standard usage,
Boeve calls this generally adopted Catholic strategy the ‘method of
correlation’. He describes it as an outlook which tries to reveal the
correlative elements between particular Catholic principles and ideas
belonging to the general modern context. The basic presupposition
of the correlational model is that there is a continuous line of associa-
tions in virtue of which the Catholic outlook and the secular/atheistic
outlook can be correlated. In my view, a static dualistic (or dichoto-
mous) conception of the two outlooks underlies this model, and also
has a very influential secular counterpart, of which Habermas is a
representative. Boeve’s proposition regarding recontextualization is
to replace this correlational scheme and adjust the Catholic strategy
to the radically diverse postsecular condition (2007: 37-38). I would
like to propose that we extend this to Habermas’ notion of postsecu-
lar consciousness.
Earlier, I made it clear that I consider this dichotomized model
unsatisfactory for reflecting on the tumultuous character of the con-
temporary situation, which I depicted with reference to Mohamad.
In this light, in appropriating Boeve’s conception of recontextualiza-
tion, I would like to argue for its application to the allegedly secular
context itself, thereby rendering recontextualization a methodologi-
cal procedure for the treatment of problems concerning the post-
secular condition. The principal idea behind this recontextualization
programme is that it provides an appropriate method for dealing
theoretically with the interconnectedness between complex cultural
and social processes, without denying their differences. This method
also seems adequate for reflecting on and expressing the dynamism of
these processes, as well as the complexities and interdependence of
the divergent contexts we need to study when addressing the postsec-
ular constellation in all its global and local aspects. Indeed, I would
argue that the postsecular character of the contemporary cultural
and social scenario requires that the interpretative schemes related
to the European context themselves undergo recontextualizing pro-
cedures. My claim, then, is that the dichotomy between the religious
and the secular must be overcome not only in Catholic methodology,
 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis  F  221

but also in the predominant secularist agenda, whose ‘formalized’

expression is zero-sum secularization theory.5
With regard to Habermas’ postsecular thesis, it is his remnant
secularism that prevents him from a more radical understanding of
the consequences implied by the evolving postsecular consciousness.
Elsewhere, I have argued that this derives from his failure to rec-
ognize that, besides the secular option, there are other religiously-
inspired ways of dealing with the essential ambiguity of religion
(Losonczi 2010). Here, I am suggesting that the recontextualizing
programme could address the postsecular conditions that follow from
the particular twofold process of globalization. On the one hand, it
could provide us with a more promising theoretical tool, in that the
postsecular contexts emerging outside the West could be interpreted
in more nuanced ways. On the other hand, the challenges of the
European context could be treated in a more promising fashion. For
the recontextualization impetus, applied to secularism, could help
in the formation of a new attitude regarding the persisting presence
of Christianity in modern conditions, and the radically pluralizing
religious situation could be accommodated in more promising ways.
Therefore, my proposed recontextualization of secularism and
secularization goes beyond the pluralism-sensitive frameworks that
Boeve proposes to replace the method of correlation and the dualis-
tic pattern it implies. Its aim is not merely to situate secularism and/
or Christianity within the evolving postsecular situation, or merely to
complicate this nexus with a radical pluralism. Rather, in the context of
the manifold logic of globalizations (Shah 2007: 2), my recontextualiza-
tion programme intends to accommodate the interactional perspective
(Van der Veer 2001: 8) among the different traditions that historically
determined the formation of the ‘secular’, and to force us to rethink the
very meaning of the public role of religion (ibid.: 27). In other words, I
suggest that a coherent application of Habermas’ postsecular thesis in

5 
Although Boeve himself is aware of this dualistic tendency, my criti-
cal approach focuses more intensively on this element of the modern
paradigm, one that informs even Habermas’ postsecular approach. I
would also suggest combining my recontextualization programme with
the ‘reconceptualization of the present’ referred to in the motto of this
chapter, and shifting the discussion of the pluralizing dynamism of the
contemporary scenario from a framework of passive pluralism to one of
active pluralism. On the problem of this distinction and the theoretical
elucidation of active pluralism, see Venheeswijck 2008.
222  f  Péter Losonczi

its postsecular consciousness form will necessarily result in the provin-

cialization of Habermas.6

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 Part IV
Deprovincializing


11
Can Postmetaphysical Reason
Escape its Provincial Roots?
Simone Chambers

W hat does it mean to ‘deprovincialize’ Habermas? One can imag-

ine a defensive answer and a sceptical answer to this question. The
defensive answer seeks to support the claim that, despite emerging
from the Western Enlightenment tradition, Habermas’ philoso-
phy can transcend those origins in its global reach and universalist
claims. Here deprovincializing might involve applying, comparing or
connecting the Habermasian paradigm to other, non-Western cul-
tures, societies and philosophies. But deprovincializing might also
have a more sceptical meaning: that despite its claims to universal-
ity, Habermas’ philosophical perspective is irredeemably provincial,
which is to say, narrow, limited and Eurocentric. Deprovincializing
here would involve exposing the particularist core of (all?) universal-
ist claims.
Habermas’ own approach to this question in some sense adopts
both perspectives. He does think that his philosophy has a global
reach, but he does not think that this is simply a matter of applying
universal truths learned by Western philosophy to other cultures. He
maintains that all universal claims are embedded in and cannot fully
escape from the situated perspective of their origin. Thus, he does not
deny, but rather embraces, the provincialism of his own philosophical
perspective. He also takes seriously the suspicion that claims to uni-
versal validity might dress up self-serving principles in the rhetoric of
universalism. But he argues that the universal claims of modern post-
metaphysical philosophy can nevertheless be defended. He argues
that this can be done not by denying their provincial origins, but by
unpacking those origins and tracing their development. Indeed, this
is the core message of his most recent, two-volume book, Auch eine
Geschichte der Philosophie (Habermas 2019, hereafter AGP). There a

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-16
230  f  Simone Chambers

reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition is undertaken

in the service of articulating an outward-looking, nondominating,
non-Eurocentric, and globally inclusive idea of postmetaphysical rea-
son that makes claims to universal validity.
In this chapter, I investigate the case that Habermas makes in AGP
for the global reach of his philosophy, with particular attention to
the claim, made at the very end of the book, that democratic con-
stitutionalism is the institutional embodiment of the lessons learned
over time by postmetaphysical philosophy. The key to this claim, I
argue, is found precisely in the idea of philosophy as a reconstruc-
tive enterprise. Philosophy does not invent postmetaphysical reason;
postmetaphysical reason, as laid out by Habermas, is the philosophi-
cal clarification of a learning process going on in the real lives of real
historical agents.
In what follows I begin with a discussion of Habermas’ defence of
philosophy as a reconstructive interpretation of cultural self-under-
standings. This would appear to circumscribe any validity claims to
the Western tradition. That Western philosophical tradition, how-
ever, is placed within a larger context bounded at one end by the
Axial Age and at the other by a global modernity that touches all
cultures. This opens the door for the possibility of a global intercul-
tural dialogue that can vindicate postmetaphysical reason’s claims to
universal validity. The idea here is that, rather than thinking that
Western philosophy has discovered certain universal truths, we
should instead think that Western philosophy can shed light on how
we might test and validate universal truth and justice claims in a
multicultural pluralistic world. Central to the persuasiveness of this
story is the example of the slow learning process associated with the
200-year development of Western constitutional democracy, driven
by expanding inclusion in the process of collective problem-solving.
In this process, participants learn the rules and conditions that need
to be in place for success, and precisely those rules and conditions are
the parameters of postmetaphysical, procedural reason. Therefore,
the universal validity of postmetaphysical reason beyond the West
depends on the possibility of a global intercultural dialogue in which
the peoples of the world learn to cooperatively solve their problems
fairly and stably.

The History of (Western) Philosophy

The subtitles of AGP’s two volumes, The Western Constellation of Faith
and Knowledge and Rational Freedom: Traces of the Discourse about
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  231

Faith and Knowledge,1 announce that the book focuses on Western

philosophy and on the relationship between religion and philosophy.
But there are really three main characters in the drama of faith and
knowledge that unfolds in the book: religion, philosophy and science.
For Habermas is as interested in clarifying the relationship of phi-
losophy to science as he is in articulating its relationship, both past
and present, to religion. He is especially concerned with a failure
to think through the moral, ethical and social implications of scien-
tific and technological advances. And he is convinced that philoso-
phy (properly understood) can play a central role in that task. What
is philosophy good for? For Habermas, it is good at unpacking and
understanding who we take ourselves to be and how we understand
the world. Thus, philosophy’s distinctive value is not in explaining or
presenting a direct reading of the world around us. Philosophy’s value
is to offer a rational clarification of our understandings of ourselves
and our world (I:12).
Who is the self that philosophy seeks to understand? AGP recon-
structs the Western philosophical tradition because that is the tradi-
tion within which Habermas finds himself. He does not have access
to other self-understandings. One can see traces of both Kant and
Hegel in this. Like Kant, Habermas understands that all knowledge
must start with knowledge about the knower. Like Hegel, Habermas
sees philosophy’s task as grasping the age in thought. Thus, the his-
tory of philosophy is entwined with, both reflecting and reflecting
on, the ‘structural transformations of worldviews [Strukturwandel der
Weltbilder]’ (I:136) happening in the broader society.
Habermas’ view of the value of philosophy is important for our
purposes. Any question of the relationship between Western and
non-Western traditions must begin with self-reflection; it must begin
with a deep assessment of how we understand ourselves and the world
– a world that includes others who have different understandings of
themselves and the world. Indeed, only a thorough understanding of
ourselves allows us to acknowledge the other as other (II:794). Thus,
the starting point of philosophy is always provincial in this sense.
Claims to universality must be constructed from within the situated
perspective of a tradition and lifeworld.

1 
Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glaube un Wissen and Vernünftige
Freiheit. Spurren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen. Unless other-
wise indicated, references are to volume and page number in AGP and
translations are my own.
232  f  Simone Chambers

In AGP Habermas offers a genealogy of Western philosophy with a

focus on the strand that issues in postmetaphysical thinking. I cannot
do justice to the full narrative here, but instead pick up three impor-
tant concepts: the Axial Age, learning processes and rational free-
dom. As we shall see, these are central to understanding Habermas’
own project of deprovincializing Western philosophy.

The Axial Age

As I mentioned above, one of Habermas’ goals is to make a plea for
the relevance of philosophy. He wants to defend the importance of
asking questions about what things ‘mean for us [für uns bedeutet]’
(I:12) – questions that have been abandoned by the empiricist and
naturalist philosophies that threaten to take over professional phi-
losophy departments. Thus, although AGP sets out to clarify the his-
tory of the relationship between faith and knowledge, the purpose is
not so much to nail down the limits of religion in the modern world.
It is instead to show the shared birth of religion, philosophy and, ulti-
mately, science in the Axial Age, and to suggest that science cannot
go it alone. Thus, it is science and, relatedly, technology whose limits
need to be nailed down. As Thomas Schmidt put it in an early review
of the book, ‘[r]eligion now appears as a welcome ally in the strug-
gle against a one-sided secular modernity, whether that be expressed
in the dominance of naturalistic, technological models of rational-
ity or in the dominance of economic ones’ (Schmidt 2020: 178, my
translation). The dominance of one-sided instrumental modernity,
Habermas suggests, is a global threat to all cultures and worldviews.
In AGP Habermas returns to the Axial Age to stress a common
beginning for both philosophy and religion. Karl Jaspers’ idea of the
Axial Age, which is having something of a revival (Bellah and Joas
2012), is that there was a turning point across unconnected civiliza-
tions, roughly in the 600 years between 800 BCE and 200 BCE.
A world of myth, characterized by an entanglement of gods with
humans and of spirits with facts gave way to perspectives, theolo-
gies, philosophies, and teachings that grasped the cosmos and our
place in the cosmos in a more abstract, reflexive and expansive way
than myth. The worldviews that emerge from this period represent
a cognitive ‘breakthrough [Durchbruch]’ that ultimately leads to
the possibility of universalism (I:182). Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras,
Buddha, Mahavira, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the Hebrew Prophets
are representative figures in this cognitive revolution. One way to
understand what these teachers had in common was that they sought
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  233

a transcendent view – or, perhaps more accurately, they began to con-

template the possibility there might be such a thing as a transcendent
view. So, for example, they conceived of a God’s eye view from out-
side the world or of Platonic forms as rational ideals standing beyond
our transient reality. Transcendence thus involves acquiring a certain
reflexive distance in thinking about the world and one’s place in it.
Looking back on the Axial Age from a Western vantage point that
has undergone a drastic split between the sacred and the profane, it
is tempting to characterize the Axial Age as a revolution in religious
thinking that led to the world religions and the conception of a dis-
tant, universal, abstract God. This is not entirely wrong, but the list
of representative figures above makes clear that the very distinction
we make today between philosophy and religion is inappropriately
applied to the Axial Age. In invoking the Axial Age, Habermas’ first
main claim is that philosophy and religion have shared roots and that
the division between the sacred and the profane is a later develop-
ment particular to the Western tradition.
A second, more controversial claim is to deflect accusations of
Eurocentrism by introducing the possibility of a common start-
ing point for all major worldviews across the globe. For Habermas,
that global starting point in transcendence opens the possibility of
universalism in all world cultures. Furthermore, embedded in that
shared starting point we see the potential for a meaningful global
cross-cultural dialogue (I:134–5, 478–80) and for a comparison
of the evolutionary trajectories of the different strands. Habermas
ends his discussion of the Axial Age by admitting that he is unpre-
pared to pursue a comparative civilizations research agenda, and by
emphasising that, in any case, one must know oneself before one
can know the other. So, he picks up the strand that develops in the
West, where the polarization between faith and knowledge has had
a constituent impact on the development of thought. But he does
stop to ask whether all such self-genealogies suffer from partisan-
ship and bias (I:478). Can we reconstruct our own story impar-
tially? Habermas’ answer is that his reconstruction, like all claims
to knowledge, must be tested in critical discourse, both among pro-
fessional philosophers and between cultures (I:479). Self-reflection
can only go so far in inoculating one’s arguments from bias; other
people, perspectives and cultural traditions must come forward and
test the claims. Thus, in reconstructing the path of Western philos-
ophy and self-understanding, Habermas returns repeatedly to the
potential for cross-cultural dialogue between traditions. I return to
this theme below.
234  f  Simone Chambers

Learning Processes
Postmetaphysical thinking is the outcome of an intellectual history
that begins in the Axial Age. But this is more than intellectual
history. Although Habermas does not want to make any claims to
be presenting a philosophy of history, he does want to present his
history of philosophy as a genealogy, tracing a line of descent or
evolution in which generations – in this case, generations of ideas
– descend from or evolve from previous generations. The driving
force of this evolution is learning. Indeed, a great deal hangs on
the idea of learning processes. For it is the toe hold that Habermas
uses to make universalist claims from an immanent starting point.
Thus, while there is no view from nowhere (I:14) and the blind
spots of Western Enlightenment ideas of progress were and still
are deeply problematic (Allen 2016), by replacing ideas of progress
with learning Habermas hopes to be able to ground genuinely uni-
versalist claims.
The first dimension of learning is that there is no necessity to
learning processes. Learning for Habermas is essentially about prob-
lem-solving, and problems themselves are the products of contin-
gent forces. Still, although there is no necessity to learning, there
is an ever-present potential for learning built into the human con-
dition. Drawing heavily on the work of Michael Tomasello (I:234–
45), Habermas joins the growing number of evolutionary scholars
who argue that human cognitive and linguistic development is not
tied to perfecting truth claims about the natural world so much as
to solving coordination problems within our intersubjective world.
Communication is the medium of such problem-solving. This view
has two important consequences. The first is that our cognitive rela-
tion to the objective world is always to a shared objective world that
we can collectively refer to as we navigate our way through it. The
second is that human linguistic cognition always contains a certain
element of reflexivity. For coordination to work, not only do we all
need to be on the same page, but we also need to know that we are
all on the same page.
Societies move ‘forward’ through solving problems, especially
problems of social integration. The solutions in turn can cause more
problems. There is no endpoint or overarching telos to this process,
and regression or backsliding is always possible. In AGP this learning
is traced through the genealogy of postmetaphysical thought. This is a
story of a series of challenges, problems and dramas taking place in the
intellectual arenas of theology and philosophy that push the Western
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  235

tradition into a series of revisions and corrections.2 The ‘problems’ to

be solved as the story unfolds have more and more to do with foun-
dations and justifications. Traditional sources of justification, such as
God, nature and natural law, begin to lose their ability to serve as a
shared foundation for claims, especially moral ones. We fall back on
the conditions of justification themselves. This leads to a procedural
idea of reason that is the core of postmetaphysical philosophy. Reason
is constituted through justification, which is to say, through giving,
receiving, demanding, criticizing, assessing, evaluating, and com-
paring reasons under conditions that safeguard the integrity of the
process of reason-giving itself. It is thus an essentially intersubjective
process. The results of this process are always fallible and corrigible,
even though we engage in it as if we could come to a final answer.

Rational Freedom and its Embodiment

The subtitle of the second volume of AGP is Rational Freedom:
Traces of Discourses about Faith and Knowledge. Beginning with the
Protestant Reformation, the plotline of this volume follows the grow-
ing crisis in knowledge as it increasingly sees itself as the other of faith
and as needing to find its own justification. The crisis comes to a head
with Hume and Kant. Here the genealogical line of postmetaphysi-
cal rationalism splits into two paths. Hume leads to a rationalism
that is radically secular in its rejection of faith, but that ends with an
empty instrumentalism and naturalism. It defeats its own purpose
since it cannot offer any meaningful alternative to or even dialogue
with religion. It sees religion as objectively false and cannot get past
that conclusion. Kant, on the other hand, leads – through Hegel, the
Left Hegelians, Marx, and Pierce – to Habermas’ postmetaphysical
reason (although the genealogy in the book ends with Pierce). This
Kantian rationalism, although still the other of religion, can have a
productive and meaningful relationship with it, and indeed together
they can offer something more than empty naturalism.
At the centre of the Kantian path is the idea of ‘rational freedom
[or reasonable freedom, vernünftiger Freiheit]’. This is the idea of the
freedom of following a law that one gives oneself, which, as articu-
lated by Peirce and also in Habermas’ own work, involves the recog-
nition that to be free and constrained by norms requires an ongoing,

2 
See Verovšek (2020) for an excellent discussion of the learning pro-
cess and the relation of these arguments to the philosophy of science.
236  f  Simone Chambers

dynamic and intersubjective process of communication and argu-

mentation. This proceduralized understanding of rational freedom
is offered as an answer to the questions, ‘who are we?’ and ‘how do
we relate to the world and to each other?’. To explain this, Habermas
ends the body of the book (there is also a postscript) with a short sec-
tion entitled, ‘Towards the Embodiment of Reason in the Practice of
Research and Politics’, in which he describes two ways in which the
structure of rational freedom is embodied in institutions: scientific
inquiry and democratic constitutionalism.
This idea of ‘embodiment’ ties back to Habermas’ ideas about
what philosophy, or philosophy at its best, does. Philosophy does not
invent ideas to be taken up and so ‘embodied’ in the sense of opera-
tionalized in practice. Philosophy engages in the self-understanding
of a way of life. It offers insight and clarification about the significance
and meaning of various things in our way of life, such as scientific
advancements or political institutions. Thus, although the final sec-
tion on ‘embodiment’ is very short, it is very important. It solidifies
and exemplifies the relationship of philosophy to the world; philoso-
phy does not come up with concepts that are then applied to the
world; philosophical concepts seek to clarify what is already in the
world. Although rational clarifications are reconstructed descrip-
tions, they also always have a practical dimension in that they can
help us to orient ourselves in the world.
The practices and institutions of modern science are an embodi-
ment of Peirce’s epistemology insofar as his epistemology is an inter-
pretation of what science and knowledge mean for us in the modern
world. Looked at the other way around, Peirce offers a framework
through which to understand the practices of the modern sciences
and to take a practical stand in evaluating, for example, lapses or
distortions in those practices. Science advances by, among other
things, improving and perfecting the processes and procedures of
scientific inquiry. Freedom and inclusion are the two characteristics
most important if the process is to embody rational freedom. The
scientific community must be free from coercion and manipula-
tion in order for participants to accept, reject and criticize truth
claims on their merit. And the process must be open to new ideas
and challenges to ensure a rigorous testing of truth claims. Pierce’s
epistemology reconstructs this dynamic by asking ‘what must we
assume’ if we are to be confident that the scientific community is
learning, building and moving forward. Habermas’ answer is that
we must assume that only the force of the better argument has
force (II:758).
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  237

Habermas wants to argue that something analogous can be said

about the embodiment of practical reason in the institutions of the
democratic constitutional state, when understood through a discur-
sive lens. He acknowledges that although one can see clear outlines
of a postmetaphysical view of reason in institutionalized procedures
of science and technology, it is much more controversial to claim that
something similar can be seen in constitutional procedures (II:763).
But he insists that, despite the ever-present possibility of regression,
the procedures of the modern constitutional state reflect the proce-
dures of practical reason and are the product of a historical learning
process.
According to Habermas, the pragmatic discursive reconstruction
of the development of the modern constitutional state makes up for a
‘justification deficit [Begründungsdefizite]’ in the rationalist tradition
coming out of the Enlightenment (II:762). That tradition offered two
competing justifications for the validity of the modern constitution,
both held captive by foundationalism. On the one hand, there was
a rights foundationalism which was unable to explain where rights
come from without appeal to controversial metaphysical views, such
as natural law. On the other hand, there was the principle of popular
sovereignty which was unable to explain why the arbitrary will of a
people could justify a constitution which was supposed to constrain
that arbitrary will. In contrast, Habermas claims that his pragmatic
discursive approach articulates the core features of the actual histori-
cal praxis in which rights and popular sovereignty were ‘performa-
tively united [perfomativ vereinigt]’ (ibid.). Modern constitutionalism
was not ‘invented [ausgedacht]’ (ibid.) by philosophy, but we require
philosophy – and, specifically, postmetaphysical philosophy – to fully
grasp what it means. Thus, in the case of democratic constitutional-
ism as in the case of science, philosophy is ‘embodied’ in the social
practice that it reconstructs.
The core claim of this reconstruction is that the radical and his-
torically unprecedented constitutional revolutions that occurred in
the ‘West’ at the end of the 18th century were a ‘solution’ to a crisis
of legitimacy brought on by the long confrontation between faith and
knowledge. These constitutions introduced procedural parameters
for collective problem-solving that embody freedom and inclusion
at their core, at least as potential. From there Habermas traces the
long bootstrapping operation which pushes for more, better and more
equal freedom and more, better and more equal inclusion.
Democracy understood along discursive lines embodies a rational
potential, with both an epistemic and a normative side. The epistemic
238  f  Simone Chambers

side implies that democracies can be truth-tracking in the sense that

they can produce good policies based on good reasons. On the nor-
mative side, the rational potential is embodied in the inclusion of all
affected and their reasons, interests and concerns. Habermas is not
claiming that majorities, elections or actual democracies always track
the truth or achieve such inclusion. He is saying that, from a delib-
erative or discursive perspective, the core features of constitutional
democracy – such as open and free debate, the equal status of citi-
zens, a porous and critical public sphere, an independent, active and
accessible free press, the circulation of information, and the inclusion
of plural points of view – can be understood as the conditions needed
to test rational instantiations of this ideal. Indeed, as Habermas (who
always ends on a dark note) suggests, this is an ideal that is particu-
larly ‘prone to failure [störanfällig]’ (II:765), since it depends on many
fragile social and cultural conditions. Rather than a story of Western
triumph and success, then, the narrative ends by identifying all the
ways in which the West has failed to live up to the ideals of constitu-
tional democracy, especially regarding the economic and social con-
ditions that are needed for meaningful inclusion (II:765–66). This
is an ideal that still inspires, however, and towards which we can
still work. Is it only an ideal for the West? How can the central fea-
tures of democratic constitutionalism claim general validity beyond
their ‘provincial’ roots? In the next section, I turn to the universalist
claims of postmetaphysical thinking and, by extension, of democratic
constitutionalism.

Deprovincializing Through Intercultural Dialogue

Early in the first volume of AGP, as part of the preparatory first
chapter, Habermas devotes a section to the question of generaliz-
able validity. In this section, ‘The Western Path of Development and
the Universal Claims of Postmetaphysical Thinking’ (I:110–35), he
acknowledges the Eurocentric focus of the book’s main narrative as
well as the ways in which past claims to universal validity have been
used by the West to justify domination and exploitation. He also
accepts that, on the surface at least, the best a genealogy can do is
make a case for the ‘internal validity’, and not the ‘external valid-
ity’, of postmetaphysical reason. This leads to the conclusion that
the universal validity of postmetaphysical thinking (like all validity
claims) needs to be defended in a global intercultural discourse in
which all participants are on an equal footing and open to learning
(I:111). But is such a discourse imaginable in the world we live in?
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  239

And, furthermore, doesn’t this ‘discursive test’ itself already presup-

pose the validity of postmetaphysical thinking?
Habermas introduces three themes in discussing the possibility
of an intercultural discourse that could vindicate postmetaphysi-
cal reason. The first is to challenge any incommensurability thesis
that suggests that civilizations or traditions are hermetically sealed
worlds, and so not open to cross-cultural dialogue, comparison or
mutual learning. The second is to outline the functional imperatives
that point to the need for such a discourse in the ever-growing net-
work of international law and economics. Finally, he takes up what
such a discourse might look like through a thought experiment. Let
us consider these three themes in turn.
Habermas rejects the view that the West is the index case of
modernization. Instead, he embraces the view that modernization
is a global trend within which different cultural traditions develop
in different directions and along different paths. All cultures must
deal with a globalized social infrastructure affected by the power of
science and technology, the bureaucratization of social coordination
and the imperatives of capitalist wealth accumulation (I:119, 127).
But the interesting question regards the interpretive stands that cul-
tures take towards these forces, stands which are informed by their
distinctive cultural trajectories, which are in turn tied to the religious
traditions that emerged from the Axial Age. The Western trajectory
is in many ways an exception, marked as it was by the drastic, yet con-
tingent, split between faith and knowledge. Thus, for Habermas, the
important question is not that of measuring levels of modernization
against the index case of the West, but rather that of the various self-
understandings of modernity and of a culture’s place in relation to
the globalized social infrastructure. The divergent cultural paths are
bookended by a common cognitive revolution of the Axial Age and
a globalized modernity that no culture can escape. Thus, Habermas’
narrative emphasises the uniqueness of the Western trajectory within
a larger context of shared potential and shared fate.
This embrace of a version of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s ‘multiple
modernities’ thesis does not downplay the dissonance, and some-
times outright hostility, that exists between some of the various
interpretations of modernity. Thus, it does not directly speak to
the likelihood or possibility of a truly global intercultural dis-
course (I:121). Instead, it is intended to serve as a rejection of three
sweeping readings of modernity: the ‘clash of civilizations’ view of
modernity, which suggests irreconcilable and insurmountable dif-
ferences between world cultures; the post-colonial critique, which
240  f  Simone Chambers

sees only Western imperialism and domination in all modernization

discourses; and the ‘end of history’ narrative, which takes Western
modernization as the index case for all societies to follow. Against
these readings, and along with the appeal to the Axial Age, the
‘multiple modernities’ argument suggests that there is a potential
for learning and dialogue between cultures.
The global reach of modernity across all world cultures is accel-
erated by developments within international law and transnational
regulation. Classical realist models of international relations become
increasingly implausible as the global web of interdependence, legal
regulation, international organizations, and cooperation grows denser.
The proliferation and intensification of law, regulation and organiza-
tions are driven by the need to solve coordination problems at the
supra-state level. Climate, energy, trade, finance, crime, weapons,
humanitarian disasters, refugees, and, of course, pandemics are just
some of the issues control of which escapes the uncoordinated actions
of nation-states (I:124). As the network of legal and regulative coordi-
nation becomes denser and the need for such coordination in the face
of crisis becomes more intense, the lack of legitimate and effective
steering institutions becomes destabilizing. Habermas suggests that
these developments put the constitutionalization of international law
and a politically constituted world society (albeit, he insists, without
a world government) on the horizon (I:125). With this, Habermas
moves the discussion from a descriptive functional claim about global
regulation and interdependence (the observer’s perspective) to a nor-
mative claim about legitimacy (the participant’s perspective), and
again appeals to the possibility of an intercultural discourse – now,
however, directed at agreement on basic constitutional principles of
international political justice (ibid.).
Finally, Habermas proposes a thought experiment with which
to imagine a global intercultural dialogue suitable for underpinning
the legitimacy of norms to govern the coexistence of a multicultural
world society. This thought experiment starts with the question
not of what the parties would agree to, but rather of the cognitive
presuppositions we would have to make in order to imagine making
any headway towards agreement, given the parties’ different start-
ing points (I:125–6). It begins with interlocutors who are divided by
different religious and metaphysical worldviews emerging from the
Axial Age, but who are nonetheless all members of modern socie-
ties confronting similar global challenges. Habermas claims that two
stages of reflexivity must be reached to successfully engage in a dis-
course that could legitimize global political norms and justify global
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  241

principles of justice. The first stage involves achieving a distanced and

reflexive perspective on one’s own worldview, brought on by contact,
communication, confrontation, and interaction with other world-
views and religious traditions. This leads to an awareness of and dif-
ferentiation between, on the one hand, the existential significance of
one’s religious self and world understanding and, on the other hand,
say, scientific facts or legal principles (I:128).
Although this stage of reflection is carried along by global mod-
ernization, mere confrontation with the forces of modernity is not
enough to trigger this reflexivity without an accompanying intercul-
tural dialogue (ibid.). The catalyst for this type of learning is com-
munication expanded by pluralism and inclusion, not economic or
scientific forces. At this stage it is possible to imagine agreements on
norms that represent a point of convergence between the cultural
traditions. This is a sort of overlapping consensus: each individual
position might still be rooted in a particular religious worldview, but
the agreement is based on a common overlap, and not on religious
principles. Habermas calls this ‘weakly’ secular (I:126, 130) because
acceptability is tied to a point of convergence. Convergence is a sec-
ular standard that overrides exclusive possession of revealed truth,
since it requires that participants become reflexively aware of the dif-
ference between their deeply held cultural and religious beliefs and
the importance of finding common ground with dialogue partners in
order to underpin and justify common norms of action. Habermas
thinks that this level of reflexivity has spread or is spreading within
all major religious and comprehensive worldviews in the modern
world (I:127). We can perhaps see glimpses of it in the ongoing inter-
national debates (philosophical, legal, political, and popular) about
human rights (Flynn 2014).
The second stage of learning is hypothetical and more demanding
than the first, since it involves the acceptance of ‘secular’ reasons in
a stronger sense. An overlapping consensus can function to under-
pin coordination, but mere convergence cannot justify a norm in a
strong sense. Thus, the second stage requires the acknowledgement
that only freestanding neutral reasons, ones that are always open
to discursive challenge and that could be accepted by anybody, can
underpin shared principles of justice. Participants are not asked to
abandon their religious views, but they are expected to move from
the ‘weakly’ secular differentiation of religious views from global
agreements to an uncoupling of religious views from agreements and
an embrace of ‘strongly’ secular reasons as justifications for principles
of justice.
242  f  Simone Chambers

Can Secular Neutrality be Deprovincialized?

Habermas began with the question, ‘what would an intercultural
dialogue that could vindicate the universal claims of postmetaphysi-
cal thinking look like?’. His answer is that it would have to be gov-
erned by the procedural requirements of postmetaphysical reason.
Habermas acknowledges that the thought experiment with which he
explains this seems to give the secular West an unfair advantage in
setting the very rules of the conversation, and that it could be seen
as disguising Western power politics and domination under claims
to neutrality (I:133). The problem arises in moving from the first to
the second stage of intercultural discourse, with the introduction of a
stronger sense of secular. For in the first stage participants recognize
each other’s equality and freedom in their commitments to coop-
erative, rather than coercive, solutions to shared problems, and they
need not embrace postmetaphysical philosophy as their own world-
view. But the second stage appears to require precisely that partici-
pants embrace postmetaphysical philosophy.
I think that Habermas’ picture is more complicated than this,
however. He is at pains to distinguish his dialogic approach from the
monological approach of instrumental rationalism and scientism, that
strand of postmetaphysical philosophy which sees religious views as
false and the people who hold them as irrational (ibid.). In contrast,
Habermas champions an egalitarian discourse in which secular and
religious participants are encouraged to learn from each other. Even
at the second stage of reflexivity, religious views and values can be
introduced and discussed, but they can furnish shared reasons only
if they can be translated into secular, or neutral, terms that all could
potentially adopt independently of their religious or comprehensive
views. But what is the defining feature of a secular reason? Habermas’
use of the term ‘secular’ in this context is sometimes misleading. It
can suggest, incorrectly to my mind, that the most important feature
of a secular reason is that it is not tied to religion. But it is preferable to
think of it in procedural terms: what defines a reason as secular is that
it is criticizable or discursively accessible. Thus, the strong secularist
requirement introduced at the second stage of the thought experi-
ment is simply that contributions must be criticizable and accessible:
dogmatism and esotericism, whether secular or religious, can have no
place in discourse. Habermas does think that at some point religious
claims will fail this criticizability test. But thinking of secular reasons
in procedural terms leaves that point open and disputable. For exam-
ple, indigenous voices articulating a view of the sacredness of nature
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  243

are gaining a growing and salutary presence in our global dialogues

about climate justice and sustainability. These contributions can be
very important in shifting perspectives away from destructive instru-
mentality and towards reconceiving sustainability. I would argue that
the appeal to ‘sacredness’ in this context passes Habermas’ ‘strong’
secularity test in that, rather than a dogmatic conversation stopper, it
can be understood, weighed and considered by non-indigenous peo-
ple, and so be argued about. Perhaps it will be objected that to require
such ‘argument’ about indigenous sacredness is to subject that value
to a peculiarly Western test. But here I follow Habermas in thinking
that solving our collective problems fairly and stably will involve talk-
ing and arguing our way through. The West might (problematically)
lionize a certain type of arguing, but arguing – in the sense of mak-
ing, considering and contesting claims – is what all communicative
beings do.
The question we began with was whether the internal validity of
postmetaphysical reason translates into an external validity. The dis-
cussion of intercultural dialogue we have been looking at, as well as
the larger historical narrative of AGP, blurs the distinction between
internal and external. The fallibility of postmetaphysical procedural
reason always pushes in the direction of inclusion: more voices, more
reasons, more arguments, more criticisms, more participants, more
perspectives. This is how we test claims. Thus, it always pushes
against a line between internal and external. Habermas thinks that
ever-expanding inclusion in collective problem-solving discourses
does not have to lead to a Tower of Babel. Under symmetrical and
fair conditions, such a dialogue can lead to an epistemically centrip-
etal momentum, in that participants see the futility of arguing in
terms of parochial truths and move towards neutral sorts of reasons,
reasons that are accessible and criticizable and the persuasiveness of
which does not depend on a commitment to a particular form of
life. The thought here is that it is only by homing in on these reasons
that participants can collectively and fairly solve problems without
being forced to abandon their distinct cultural traditions. Thus, the
possibility of neutral reasons is a safeguard of cultural diversity, not
a demand for assimilation. Moreover, as I have argued, this requires
that neutrality be understood procedurally, as determined in criti-
cal discourse itself. On my reading, it is not impossible to think that
indigenous appeals to the sacredness of nature (or other religiously
inflected appeals, such as the Jewish idea of Tikkun Olam, ‘care of
the world’) could be neutral in the sense that their persuasiveness
need not depend on embracing indigenous spirituality as a way of
244  f  Simone Chambers

life. Passing the neutrality test need not require translation in a strict
sense, although it does require being able to explain how the reason
supports the claim or proposal.
Habermas’ thought experiment is therefore not a normatively
prescriptive story in which Western philosophy lays out the price of
admission to a global society. Remember, he does not think that phi-
losophy comes up with ideas and then tries to sell them to the world.
Rather, in his view, philosophy reconstructs self and world under-
standings that have come into the world through a structural trans-
formation of worldviews. Habermas is suggesting that his thought
experiment is the reconstruction of a potential learning process that
is taking place, or that could take place, in the real world. We are
being forced by global coordination problems to engage in intercul-
tural dialogues, negotiations and problem-solving. These dialogues
contain a learning potential such that we come to see the sorts of
conditions that would make agreements stable, and outcomes justi-
fied. Thus, the West does not teach the rest; the pragmatics of coex-
istence open this potential, and the validity of Habermas’ picture
ultimately rests on participants experiencing, and reflexively embrac-
ing, these shifts in perspective. To shed more light on this potential
learning process, in conclusion I will now return to the validity claims
attached to democratic constitutionalism.

Bootstrapping Our Way to Democratization

The analysis of a rational potential embedded in democratic consti-
tutionalism that Habermas lays out in AGP is at a very different level
of analysis than that of policy and politics. Learning processes trace
slow, long-term evolutions of worldviews. The Western path tapped
into a universal potential of reason in the sense that it led to an
ever more proceduralized, and therefore ever more inclusive, under-
standing of reason itself. Two features of this story make any policy
of democracy promotion outside the West problematic, while also
indicating potential avenues for democratization at the international
level as well as the domestic one. The first is how much the accidents
of history, and not the plans of actors, played a role, and the second
is how long it took (or, better, how long it is taking) for democratic
constitutionalism to take root.
Modern democratic constitutions entered the world quite suddenly,
in what Habermas calls the ‘historically unprecedented praxis’ of the
18th-century revolutions (II:762). Although the constitutions articu-
lated universal human and civil rights, they were at best promissory
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  245

notes for the future. One need only point to the compromises on slav-
ery in the American context to see the obvious disconnect between
principles and reality. Nonetheless, these constitutions were turning
points that launched a learning process, or what could also be seen
as a bootstrapping operation through which the promise of equality
and freedom articulated in the founding documents slowly emerges.
Central to this learning process is the continuous push for inclusion
on equal terms. Expanding inclusion is both the result of the applica-
tion and interpretation of the constitution and the impetus to push for
new applications and interpretations. But even more important is the
fact that the resulting addition of voices, perspectives, arguments, and
reasons continually, if slowly, augments the epistemic and normative
conditions of the democratic process itself. Court decisions protecting
gay marriage, for example, can be read in this circular or bootstrap-
ping way, as both facilitating the legal inclusion of formerly excluded
individuals and responding to the inclusion of new voices in the public
sphere, voices that have in turn been formed in a lifeworld that instils
aspirations of equality and respect.
The lesson to be taken from constitutional bootstrapping is that
fully formed democracy cannot be exported; it can only take root
through learning. As Habermas has famously insisted, deliberative
politics needs a corresponding lifeworld that can meet it halfway
(1996: 302). Politics (in the narrow sense) cannot create a civic cul-
ture ex nihilo. Lifeworld preconditions take time and history and are
subject to contingency. One can write as many constitutions as one
wants, but without some underlying lifeworld purchase for the ideas
contained in a constitution, it is not likely to take root and serve its
purpose of structuring the ‘circular process [Kreisprozess]’ (II:764) of
bootstrapping.
Democracy needs a lifeworld purchase. But we live in a globalized
world where, if the World Values Survey is to be believed, democ-
racy is a global value: everybody wants it (Haerpfer et al. 2020). And
although not everyone has the same understanding of what democracy
means – learning will be different in different contexts, of course –
what Western constitutionalization suggests is that the engine behind
learning is the dynamic tension between rights and democracy. It is
not only that constitutions need democracy to be legitimate and stable
over the long run. It is also that democracy needs constitutions – that
is, strong systems of civil and political rights that push in the direc-
tion of inclusion – in order to thrive, take hold and generate legiti-
macy. The Arab Spring, for example, spawned discussion of the desire
for democracy without liberalism and a number of populist regimes
246  f  Simone Chambers

have embraced the ‘illiberal democracy’ tag (Hamid 2014; Chambers

2019). Of course, much depends on what is meant by the liberalism
that is being left out. But if this means popular government without
basic rights of freedom of religion, speech and association, then the
Habermasian view suggests that democracy itself will founder and
devolve into a more or less violent competition for state power.
The schedule of rights that develops outside the West may and will
look different from those that have developed in Western democra-
cies. For example, economic and social rights might play a more prom-
inent role, and religious freedom is likely to be protected in ways that
differ from a context informed by wars of religion. But one common
feature of these rights must be the safeguarding of an egalitarian inclu-
sion of voices. Thus, the future of democracy lies in the creation and
protection of spheres of communication, debate and criticism.
The story of Western bootstrapping also sheds light on the pos-
sibility of a global human rights regime. Habermas’ picture of the
slow dynamic interplay between democracy and rights suggests that
international human rights also require a bootstrapping process
of inclusion, articulation and enactment. Thus, Habermas rejects
human rights fundamentalism (just as he rejects natural law justi-
fications for constitutional rights), according to which human rights
are simply universally true principles that we must apply globally.
Human rights rather need to be brought into being, and continu-
ally tested and expanded, through collective, inclusive and discursive
processes, while at the same time giving structure and safeguards to
those very processes. Like the validity of democratic constitutional-
ism, the validity of universal human rights is redeemed in real-world
discourses in which participants come to see themselves as free and
equal and as the bearers of rights. This is why Habermas calls for the
constitutionalization of human rights and not simply for the global
application of and respect for human rights. This process need not
resemble that which followed the Western revolutions of the 18th
century, and nor need democracy and rights at the global level be in
quite the same close relationship of co-originality as in nation-states.
The process and its results are driven not by any teleological neces-
sity, but by the expansion of intercultural dialogue beyond state rep-
resentatives negotiating international agreements (Flynn 2014).

Conclusion
Democratic constitutionalism is the solution to problems that arose
within the Western context and tradition. From the participant’s
 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots?  F  247

perspective, it is the solution to the problem of how agents who under-

stand themselves as free and equal can coordinate their action through
law and justify coercion without recourse to metaphysics. From the
observer’s perspective, the rule of law embodied in modern constitu-
tionalism is the solution to the problem of coordination in complex
modern societies. That problem-solving process involved the growing
clarification of a proceduralized conception of reason that offers an
account of rational justification under conditions of pluralism, differ-
ence and disagreement. At the core of the case for the global relevance
of democratic constitutionalism is the idea that force and coercion are
inherently unstable means of social coordination for beings who are
communicative and therefore norm following. Norm following calls for
justification, and justification under conditions of pluralism requires
embracing procedural ideals of equality and freedom. What is cen-
tral are the procedural conditions of equal and open participation in
processes of collective problem-solving, such that they can potentially
launch a learning process whereby we learn what works and what does
not.
Does this imply a sort of inexorable march of postmetaphysical rea-
son, an ‘end-of-history’ narrative, if we just get people trying to solve
their problems together? Habermas does not claim that other cultures
will follow the same path as the West. Indeed, other cultures have
clearly followed different paths. But these divergent paths are flanked
by the common cognitive revolution of the Axial Age and a globalized
modernity that no culture can escape. Thus, Habermas’ narrative
involves the uniqueness of the Western trajectory within a larger
context of shared potential and shared fate. That shared potential is
expressing itself in claims to universal validity on behalf of human
rights and democracy that are being tested in intense global, critical
(especially critical of Western bias) and increasingly inclusive debate.
The shared fate is expressing itself in global coordination challenges,
such as those regarding climate change, that will require intensifying
and deepening international cooperation and regulation. Neither of
these trends comes with guarantees, and we are perhaps seeing regres-
sion. Indeed, Habermas is often very pessimistic about the likelihood
that we will solve our global problems, let alone that we will do so in
a fair and just way. The future is open (including open to catastrophic
reversals) and subject only to an ordinary, observable but ultimately
disruptable path dependency – there is no inexorability or inevita-
bility to the Habermasian story. But the claim here is that ‘depro-
vincializing’ Habermas is not about applying his philosophy beyond
the West; it is about understanding his philosophy as a plausible and
248  f  Simone Chambers

persuasive reconstruction of what is happening and could happen in a

world that is itself (possibly) deprovincializing.

References
Allen, Amy. 2016. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative
Foundations of Critical Theory, Columbia University Press, New York.
Bellah, Robert, and Hans Joas (eds). 2012. The Axial Age and Its
Consequences, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Chambers, Simone. 2019. ‘Democracy and Constitutional Reform:
Deliberative Versus Populist Constitutionalism’, Philosophy and
Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1116–31.
Flynn, Jeffrey. 2014. Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human
Rights: A Philosophical Approach, Routledge, New York.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a
Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA.
———. 2019. Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, Band I: Die okzidentale
Konstellation von Glaube un Wissen, Band II: Vernünftige Freiheit.
Spurren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen, Suhrkamp, Berlin.
Haerpfer, Christian, et al. (eds). 2020. ‘Findings and Insights’, World
Values Survey: Wave Seven, http://www​.worldvaluessurvey​.org ​/
WVSContents​.jsp​?CMSID​=Findings (accessed 11 January 2021).
Hamid, Shade. 2014. Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal
Democracy in a New Middle East, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Schmidt, Thomas M. 2020. ‘Die Konstellation von Glauben und Wissen:
Zur Genealogie des nachmetaphysischen Denkens bei Jürgen
Habermas’, Communio: Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift 49:
192–205.
Verovšek, Peter. 2020. ‘Habermas’s Politics of Rational Freedom:
Navigating the History of Philosophy between Faith and Knowledge’,
Analyse & Kritik 42 (1): 191–218.
12
Decentring Eurocentrism
Through Dialogue
Jeffrey Flynn

T he aim of ‘deprovincializing’ Habermas is not entirely foreign to

Habermas’ own thinking. Quite the opposite. It is a central aim of
his recent work, in which he attempts to articulate a conception of
modernity that is not simply modelled on Western cultures. This
aim is not merely theoretical; it is also practical. The guiding idea is
that modernity conceived in this way provides a shared multicultural
framework within which global dialogue could occur. Such dialogue
is crucial if humanity is to be able to deal collectively with current
and future challenges, such as agreeing on normative standards like
human rights or addressing crises like climate change and global
pandemics.
Habermas places a great deal of weight on intercultural dialogue
to do the work of uncovering Western biases. But if those biases are
already embedded within his theoretical framework itself, as some
critics charge, how can intercultural dialogue be part of the solution
to the problem of Eurocentrism? Dialogue in the form he proposes,
framed by a Eurocentric theoretical apparatus, would be part of the
problem. This set of issues is complicated enough. But it is made even
more difficult by the fact that at times both Habermas and his critics
are unclear about how particular elements of his theoretical frame-
work bear on or intersect with the dialogue he promotes. My aim in
this chapter is to clarify some of these issues.
In the first part of the chapter, I provide a brief sketch of Habermas’
contributions to the intercultural dialogue on human rights. The aim
here is to see how he attempts to strike a balance between his own
theoretical approach to human rights and his commitment to the
idea that all participants in intercultural dialogue on human rights,
including himself, must be open to learning from others. I argue that
the theoretical constructs which Habermas uses, both to frame inter-
cultural dialogue in terms of his discourse theory and to defend a

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-17
250  f  Jeffrey Flynn

particular conception of human rights within the dialogue, do not

pose substantial obstacles to dialogue. This sets the stage for turning,
in the second part of the chapter, to Habermas’ theory of modernity
as the broader framework within which he situates the intercultural
dialogue on human rights. A similar question arises here as to whether
Habermas’ theoretical apparatus undermines the kind of inclusive
dialogue he promotes as a way of decentring Eurocentrism. I consider
two objections in particular. The first holds that Habermas’ view of
Western learning processes as a form of progress precludes open and
inclusive dialogue with non-Western others. The second holds that
Habermas’ genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking is exclusionary
both in form and content. Regarding both objections, I show how
both Habermas and his critics tend to be unclear about what is at
stake in different kinds of dialogue, involving different kinds of issues
and different kinds of participants. Clarifying these issues does not
by itself deprovincialize Habermas’ thought, but it will show how
the dialogical path Habermas embraces for further deprovincializing
his thought is not foreclosed in the ways that some of his critics have
argued.

Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights

Habermas has long stressed the crucial role of intercultural dialogue
on human rights in decentring Eurocentrism. As he put it in a 2002
interview,

insofar as this intercultural discourse on human rights occurs under

conditions of reciprocal recognition, it has the potential of leading the
West toward a decentered understanding of a normative construct
that no longer remains the property of Europeans, and can no longer
mirror the particularities of one culture (2002: 153).

In fact, one of Habermas’ earliest direct engagements with the charge

of Eurocentrism was his entrée into the intercultural dialogue on
human rights in the late 1990s, at a time when debates about the
compatibility of human rights with non-Western traditions were
heating up.
For context, recall that in the leadup to the 1993 United Nations
World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, representatives of
various Asian states issued the ‘Bangkok Declaration’, which stressed
the need to keep in mind the ‘significance of national and regional par-
ticularities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds’
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  251

(The Ministers and Representatives of Asian States 1995: 206). This

could be read as a legitimate reminder of the fact of cultural diversity,
but critics were wary of the Declaration’s role as ideological cover
for the authoritarian rulers who had a hand in authoring it. Critical
voices were not restricted to Westerners defending Western concep-
tions of human rights. A counterstatement was issued by a group of
Asian NGOs stressing, among other things, the universality, indivisi-
bility and interdependence of human rights (United Nations General
Assembly 1993). This just reminds us that the intercultural dialogue
on human rights cannot be reduced to stereotypical conceptions of
East vs. West; intracultural dialogue on human rights has long been
ongoing in all societies.
Habermas intervened in this and related debates with the essay
‘Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights’ (2001; the essay
built on an op-ed published in 1997). I categorize his core arguments
in terms of three recurring moments in his work on human rights
and his work more broadly: the critical moment, the affirmative (or
‘reconstructive’) moment and the dialogical moment.
Beginning with the critical moment, Habermas stresses how
securing rights for all within the West has involved a long process
of ‘decentring’ in which those excluded from the allegedly univer-
sal category of rights-bearers have struggled for inclusion. Similarly,
when he shifts to the global context he is critical of the ‘shameless
instrumentalization of human rights that conceals particular inter-
ests behind a universalistic mask’ (2001: 129). In short, Habermas
maintains that one cannot enter an intercultural dialogue on human
rights without a frank assessment of this history of exclusion and the
misuse of human rights by Western powers pursuing imperial and
colonial aims.
But Habermas accompanies this critical moment with an affirm-
ative stance, maintaining that the meaning of human rights is not
‘exhausted by their misuse’ (2001: 129). The ideological use of
human rights should not overshadow their emancipatory potential,
even though their misuse naturally gives rise to ‘the suspicion that
human rights might be reducible to this ideological function’ (2001:
120). When this critique turns into an all-encompassing critique of
reason, however, it

fails to notice the peculiar self-referential character of the discourse

of modernity. The discourse of human rights is also set up to provide
every voice with a hearing. Consequently, this discourse itself sets the
standards in whose light the latent violations of its own claims can be
252  f  Jeffrey Flynn

discovered and corrected. … Human rights, which demand the inclu-

sion of the other, function at the same time as sensors for exclusionary
practices exercised in their name (2001: 120).

We need not view the history of human rights with rose-coloured

glasses. Nevertheless, as a discourse premised on universal inclusion
the ideal not only exceeds any exclusionary iteration of human rights
practice, but also provides a language that can be used to critique that
exclusion.
The primary affirmative tool that Habermas relies on is rational
reconstruction, bringing it to bear in the intercultural dialogue on
human rights, first, at the more abstract level of discourse theory and,
second, with his rational reconstruction of the system of rights at the
heart of constitutional democracies. Starting with discourse theory
more generally, Habermas points out that

hermeneutical reflection on the starting point of a human rights dis-

course among participants of different cultures draws our attention to
normative contents that are present in the tacit presuppositions of any
discourse whose goal is mutual understanding. That is, independently
of their cultural backgrounds all the participants intuitively know
quite well that a consensus based on conviction cannot come about as
long as symmetrical relations do not exist among them – relations of
mutual recognition, mutual role-taking, a shared willingness to con-
sider one’s own tradition with the eyes of the stranger and to learn
from one another, and so forth (2001: 129; see also 2003: 290–2).

Habermas is referring here to the idealizations he analyses in his

discourse theory of argumentation. Those can be summed up with
the idea that when someone defends a claim with arguments, they
implicitly presuppose that genuinely convincing others cannot be
achieved by excluding relevant participants from the conversation,
issuing threats to secure agreement and so forth (2008). The idea
is that participants in argumentation implicitly make these assump-
tions simply by engaging in a cooperative endeavour to justify claims
only with arguments.
These are certainly demanding constraints to place on intercul-
tural dialogue. But they are precisely what make dialogue a decen-
tring process, and this is crucial to the way discourse theorists
conceive of justifying universal human rights. Universality is not
established by deriving human rights from a single authoritative
source, as in traditional approaches. Rather, the universal validity
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  253

of any rights claim must be defended within an ever more inclusive

dialogue in which participants establish what really is in the equal
interest of all. The path to universality is sought through an ongo-
ing process of decentring perspectives, particularly the Eurocentric
perspective that has long dominated the discourse of human rights.
In this way, the intercultural dialogue on human rights provides a
concrete opportunity to become aware of one’s own blind spots,
which arise most clearly when confronted by positions drawing on
different background assumptions, and to try to establish common
ground in the context of diversity.
Engaging in such a practice is not easy, and one objection that
often arises here is that the discourse-theoretic approach to open
and inclusive dialogue places Eurocentric burdens on non-Western
participants from the start.1 Consider Charles Taylor’s version of
this objection. He objects to the way that Kantians like Habermas
defend their distinction between the right and the good, or moral-
ity and ethics, in maintaining that universal consensus around
human rights norms (the right) should be sought even while ethical
disagreement (over the good) continues. Such views, Taylor main-
tains, rely on a ‘discourse of philosophical authority’ based on an
‘epistemological distinction’ that places unacceptable demands on
some participants in intercultural dialogue. ‘One shouldn’t ask an
Aristotelian or a Thomist, let alone people from other cultures
altogether, to buy this radical distinction between the right and the
good, or between definitions of rights and those of human flour-
ishing’, Taylor insists. We should not, he claims, ‘try to make an
Aristotelian culture buy into Kantianism as a prelude to signing the
Universal Declaration’ (Taylor 1994: 247).
Taylor is right to stress that philosophers should approach inter-
cultural dialogue with humility. But that does not preclude making
philosophical arguments when framing the dialogue itself. If we dis-
tinguish the theoretical level at which Habermas frames the dialogue
from the practical level of participation in dialogue, the objection
loses its force. Habermas does not insist that everyone accept, prior to
dialogue, his own theoretical justification for the distinction between
norms one hopes might be acceptable to all and other aspects of one’s
worldview on which continued disagreement is expected. In fact,
Taylor himself argues that intercultural dialogue on human rights can
only succeed if participants are willing to accept something like this

1 
In what follows I draw on passages from my book, Flynn 2014: 126ff.
254  f  Jeffrey Flynn

very distinction (Taylor 1999). This is not surprising, since it does

seem to be an inescapable presupposition of intercultural dialogue, a
practice that simply makes no sense if participants cannot recognize
their own culture as one among others and display a willingness to
look at their own traditions through the eyes of a stranger. In short,
Taylor criticizes Habermas for trying to provide a theoretical justi-
fication for a distinction that is crucial to Taylor’s own approach –
indeed, any approach – to intercultural dialogue on human rights
norms. The only difference is that Taylor does not provide a deeper
theoretical underpinning for the distinction. The fact that discourse
theory goes beyond the pragmatic defence Taylor offers no more gets
in the way of actual dialogue than does Taylor’s own proposal, which
requires the same kind of disposition and acceptance of pluralism by
participants.
A broader implication of this is that it is important to be clear
about what it means for Habermas himself to participate in intercul-
tural dialogue, and the degree to which at different levels he makes
different types of theoretical proposals with different degrees of mod-
esty.2 Consider three levels of dialogue on human rights: about their
content, about the Western model of legitimation through human
rights, and about the broader meaning or significance of human rights
in the world today.
At the first level, about the content of human rights, Habermas
contributes little by way of substance. This is consistent with his
proceduralist approach: participants in dialogue should make those
arguments themselves. Habermas does draw on discourse theory
to analyse the hermeneutic situation of those who engage in such
dialogue. But, as I argued above, his theoretical framing is no more
an obstacle to dialogue on human rights than any more theoreti-
cally modest approach would have to be if such dialogue is going to
succeed.
When it comes to the second level, that of proposing a more robust
model of how human rights can be instantiated within any society,
Habermas attempts to strike a balance between a robust defence of a
particular conception of human rights as developed within the West
and the openness required of a participant in intercultural dialogue.
Here he brings to bear his own rational reconstruction of the Western
system of rights developed in Between Facts and Norms, which I will

2 
On the difference between Habermas and Rawls in this regard, see
Flynn 2011.
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  255

not summarize in detail here. 3 Habermas draws on this model to

address two ways in which the ‘European conception of human rights
is open to attack’ (2001: 127): objections to individualistic and secu-
larist interpretations of human rights associated with the West. As
to individualism, Habermas defends his reconstruction of the system
of rights as resting on intersubjective foundations rather than ‘pos-
sessive individualism’ or pre-political natural rights. As for secular-
ism, in that early essay on human rights he argued that the aim of
having secular foundations for human rights is less about hostility to
religion and more a response to the challenge of religious diversity in
the West. But a great deal of Habermas’ subsequent work has been
focused on the question of how to understand the development of
secular thought in the West and its potential role in a global conversa-
tion about human rights and other issues. That is the subject of the
next part of the chapter. The key point to make here is that Habermas
defends aspects of his rational reconstruction of the Western model
that he thinks really could make a substantive difference in the global
debate. He stresses that the Western mode of legitimation is not nec-
essarily the only or the best approach, but that it did arise in response
to general challenges that affect all societies today (2002: 128).
As to the third level, that of interpreting the broader meaning or
significance of human rights, Habermas has more recently relied on
another type of affirmative tool: genealogy (2012). Of course, geneal-
ogy is more often used as a critical than as an affirmative tool, but there
are recent examples of affirmative or vindicatory genealogy (Joas 2013).
In Habermas’ genealogy, he attempts to draw a connection between
human rights and the idea of human dignity. He takes the contem-
porary resonance of human dignity – what he refers to as the post-
Holocaust moral charge, which he admits was not explicitly present in
18th-century rights declarations – as a jumping-off point for showing
how some elements of human rights practice going back hundreds of
years are best understood, in hindsight, with the concept of dignity.
This points to a historically dynamic understanding of the developing
practice of human rights at the core of which are struggles generated
by experiences of violated dignity. Habermas stresses the importance
of keeping the moral engine of this practice in view, recalling what
has been learned from this historical process as a way of engendering
both an attitude of openness to the ways in which the practice can and
should expand and a certain degree of vigilance in guarding against

3 
For a fuller treatment, see Flynn 2014: ch. 4.
256  f  Jeffrey Flynn

regress or backsliding. For example, he cites the prohibition of torture,

probably in view of US policies after 9/11, and refers to capsizing ships
carrying refugees from Libya to Italy (2012: 74–5, 94–5). In this way,
Habermas affirms a conception of human dignity that can provide a
powerful moral bulwark for human rights practice in the present by
telling a particular story about the important role it has played in the
past. It affirms the practice by constructing the resources for a new
understanding of the past and for affirming and sustaining the practice
in the present and into the future.
My aim here is not to evaluate the cogency of Habermas’
arguments, but to outline his strategy for engaging the intercul-
tural dialogue on human rights as one path towards decentring
Eurocentrism. In short, he defends his reconstruction of what
he takes to be the most compelling interpretation of the system
of rights at the heart of Western constitutional democracies. He
maintains that human rights took shape as they did in the West in
response to challenges that now affect all societies; for this reason,
they might have much to offer non-Western societies too. But he
combines this affirmative stance towards human rights with the
critical acknowledgement of their potential for misuse and with
an openness to revealing such limits through intercultural dia-
logue. In this way, we see how the first two moments in Habermas’
approach, the critical and affirmative moments, do crucial prepara-
tory work for the third, dialogical moment, insofar as they help to
frame that dialogue with ideas and ideals acknowledged to have
both emancipatory and ideological uses.

The Global Discourse of Modernity

Having provided a sense of how Habermas’ framing of intercultural
dialogue over human rights as a theorist is consistent with the sub-
stantive positions he takes as a participant, I now turn to related
challenges to his recent defence of his theory of modernity and his
genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking. Here too we see the three
moments outlined above as Habermas aims to prepare the ground for
intercultural dialogue by both critiquing Western colonial imposi-
tions and affirming the mode of postmetaphysical thought developed
within the West.
I focus on two objections to Habermas. The first is that devel-
opmentalist assumptions about Western progress that are central
to his theory of modernity pose an insuperable obstacle to open
and inclusive dialogue. The second objection is that his genealogy
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  257

of postmetaphysical thinking is exclusionary in focusing solely on a

Western audience, and that this deficit in the genealogy cannot be
made up for with intercultural dialogue alone. In reply to the first
objection, I argue that Habermas’ theory of modernity is not an obsta-
cle to open and inclusive dialogue. In reply to the second, I argue that
the form and purpose of his genealogy are not inherently exclusion-
ary, but that Habermas cannot use the call for dialogue to sidestep
important criticisms of the content of his genealogy. In short, depro-
vincializing through dialogue is crucial, but so is deprovincializing
Habermas’ genealogical story about modernity.
Before turning to the objections, I want to highlight some key
elements in Habermas’ work on postmetaphysical thinking in his
recently published Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019).4 The
core aim of the book is to provide a genealogy of postmetaphysical
thinking that will show how its development within the works of var-
ious Western philosophers was part of a learning process. Habermas
mitigates this admittedly Eurocentric focus with two types of decen-
tring move: one backward-looking and one outward-looking. The key
to the backward-looking move is the way he draws on Karl Jaspers’
account of the Axial Age (800–200 BCE) as a period in which all
civilizations experienced a cognitive breakthrough that gave rise to
a more highly reflexive view of the cosmos. This is in part aimed at
identifying a kind of common ground that all contemporary civili-
zations can look back to, a significant development for the human
species that is not simply traced to Western developments. The
outward-looking decentring move relies on an understanding of
modernization not as an exclusively Western phenomenon, but as
giving rise to a social and institutional infrastructure that all cultures
must come to terms with, given the powerful impact of science and
technology, bureaucratic administration and capitalist economies.
Habermas draws on the research paradigm of ‘multiple modernities’
to capture the idea of culturally distinct modes of grappling with
modern social conditions, ultimately viewing ‘modernity’ less as a
European cultural development and more as ‘the arena in which dif-
ferent civilizations encounter one another in the course of their more
or less culture-specific configuration of this common infrastructure’

For a much fuller treatment of themes in the book, see Simone

4 

Chambers’ brilliant chapter in this volume.

258  f  Jeffrey Flynn

(2019 I: 119).5 These two decentring moves both situate European

civilization as one civilization among others, forming the bookends
around Habermas’ otherwise largely Eurocentric story of the devel-
opment of postmetaphysical thinking.
Habermas admits early on in Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie
that his genealogy cannot itself establish the universal validity of post-
metaphysical reasoning (2019 I: 110–135). This is a crucial juncture
in the book because here Habermas draws the connection between
his genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking and his proposal for inter-
cultural dialogue on both a theoretical framework for and substantive
discussion of normative principles of justice to govern a world society.
While the existing intercultural dialogue on human rights shows that
the latter is underway at least to some extent (2021: 72), Habermas
proposes a ‘thought experiment’ to work out what a more thorough-
going process of dialogue would have to look like at the global level
if it is to generate truly shared reasons to support globally valid prin-
ciples of justice (2019 I: 125–6). Without going into greater detail
on that proposal, the key point to make here is that Habermas gives
pride of place to intercultural dialogue as the crucial testing ground
for determining whether his approach to postmetaphysical thinking
has been adequately decentred.

Progress and Dialogue

A powerful version of the first objection can be seen in the trenchant
critique of the lingering Eurocentrism in Habermas’ work that appears
in Amy Allen’s book, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative
Foundations of Critical Theory (2016). One of her central criticisms is
that Habermas’ view of Western learning processes undermines the
ability of Habermasian critical theory to engage adequately with the
insights and arguments of postcolonial and decolonial theory. A core
aim of the latter has been to show how developmentalist and pro-
gressive readings of history have been used to justify colonialism and
imperialism. For Allen, like many other critics, this raises problems
for Habermas’ claim that significant aspects of European moder-
nity represent developmental advances over premodern forms of life
(Allen 2016: 72). The claim most relevant to my present concerns is
that Habermas’ conception of Western progress – what Allen refers to

5 
Translations from Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie are my own,
and references are to volume and page number.
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  259

as the ‘metanormative’ position that underlies his normative commit-

ments – poses a substantial obstacle to open and inclusive intercul-
tural dialogue. Allen argues that Habermas’ appeal to the distinction
between theorist and participant, which I relied on above, does not
help here since his dualistic positioning in relation to dialogue is sim-
ply unworkable. Habermas’ stance, she maintains, requires that ‘the
Habermasian participant in an intercultural dialogue … toggle back
and forth between two different points of view’, and ‘such a stance
… arguably places insuperable cognitive obstacles on Western par-
ticipants in intercultural dialogue’. The developmentalist premise in
Habermas’ thought means that a Habermasian will view ‘her own
postmetaphysical and postsecular point of view as developmentally
superior to traditional and religious points of view’. This is in tension,
Allen argues, with a participant in intercultural dialogue being ‘open
to learning from these others and in particular to learning from them
about her own Western biases’ (ibid.: 74). She writes,

a Western participant who views, at a metanormative level, her own

form of life as the outcome of a historical developmental learning
process can be as open-minded and fallibilist as she likes; in the
process of dialogue with non-Western others she can never be sure
whether she is disagreeing with the content of their views for good
reasons or dismissing them out of hand because she views their
adherents as developmentally inferior, as not having learned some-
thing that she now knows. This is not a matter of good or bad will
on the part of the Western participant; it is simply a function of the
logic of her own developmentalist metanormative position…. The
crucial point is this: viewing one’s dialogue partners in this way is
not conducive to adopting a stance of dialogical openness and inclu-
sion (ibid.: 75).

Indeed, Allen alleges that this stance not only precludes openness,
but also seems to stack the deck in favour of the West from the start:

It is as if we should say, in our substantive intercultural dialogical

engagements: I believe my normative principles and procedures to be
developmentally superior to yours, but I’m a fallibilist, so I am open
to you convincing me otherwise, on discursive terms that are set in
accordance with my normative point of view (ibid.: 210–11).

There is much to unpack here, but the core claims are that (1) a
Western participant in intercultural dialogue who adopts Habermas’
260  f  Jeffrey Flynn

theoretical stance will have trouble taking non-Western participants

seriously as interlocutors from whom they can possibly learn some-
thing, and that (2) the framework for dialogue is biased towards
Western presuppositions that are not themselves up for discussion.
In response, the first thing to note is that the above quote argu-
ably provides a misleading gloss on Habermas’ position. The distinc-
tion between theorist and participant can help to explain why. For
there would be no reason for a participant in substantive intercultural
engagements, Habermasian or otherwise, to state that they believe
their normative procedures are ‘developmentally superior’ to their
interlocutors. The aim of intercultural engagement on human rights
principles, for example, would be to determine whether those prin-
ciples are in the equal interest of all. Stating that one believes one’s
principles are developmentally superior would hardly be an effec-
tive way of convincing others. That kind of argument would have no
credence in that context. It would be like saying that my commit-
ment to certain normative principles is grounded in my own religious
beliefs. That has no credence for interlocutors who do not share those
beliefs. In actual intercultural dialogue about a specific issue, one’s
own background arguments for one’s metanormative position (to use
Allen’s term) are not really the focal point for discussion. That is not
to say that the framework for dialogue defended by Habermas as a
theorist is entirely off the table for discussion. It just tends to be a
discussion taken up by theorists. And this is not to say that the divide
between theorists and participants is rigid. The framework for dia-
logue can certainly become a topic of discussion for highly reflective
participants, but even then, it simply would not do for a Habermasian
to end the debate by stating that their own framework is developmen-
tally superior to others. Any claims about historical developments are
up for discussion.
In reply, Allen might return to her initial charge, that a
Habermasian participant in dialogue faces ‘insuperable cognitive
obstacles’ to being fully open to being convinced by participants who
they will always be tempted to view as developmentally inferior.
When it comes to identifying those non-Western interlocutors, how-
ever, Allen is not always consistent. At some points she invokes the
idea of a ‘dialogue with non-Western others’ very generally (ibid.:
75). At other points she is more specific, referring to a ‘dialogue with
post- and decolonial theory’ (ibid.: 166, emphasis added) and to an
‘intercultural dialogue with subaltern subjects’ (ibid.: 202 and 210).
But, of course, a dialogue with the former can be quite different
from a dialogue with the latter.
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  261

Consider first a Habermasian engaging with a postcolonial theo-

rist. There is no danger of viewing the latter as developmentally
inferior, since such theorists are of course fully immersed in the
global discourse of modernity already. The global discourse of
modernity – ostensibly a discourse among theorists and highly
reflective intellectuals – is already multicultural in the sense that
there are participants from all corners of the globe. Those inter-
locutors are clearly able to dispute Habermas’ assumptions and
presuppositions about modernity, and Habermas is certainly in
no position to disregard contributions to that debate by any non-
Western interlocutors. Moreover, when Habermas engages theories
of modernity – maintaining, for example, that theories of multiple
modernities are promising – he is analysing structural features of
the context for contemporary intercultural dialogue. At that gen-
eral level, Habermas can point out that no major culture is in dan-
ger of being treated as developmentally inferior because as a matter
of fact all such cultures have become modern. Here it is worth
stressing a point which Thomas McCarthy makes about the multi-
cultural discourse of modernity: ‘Every culture has its virtuosos of
historical and cultural reflexivity capable in principle of participat-
ing in this discourse on equal terms; and postcolonial intellectu-
als are typically more aware than their Western counterparts of
the unquestioned, taken for granted character of Western patterns
and presuppositions’ (2012: 6).6 In a debate in which the metanor-
mative position is the topic – a debate in which the participants
are reflectively capable of interrogating metanormative positions
– the interlocutors would in principle be on equal ground. But if
this allows us to set aside the worry that Habermas relegates non-
Western societies as a whole to the status of being developmentally
inferior, what exactly is the worry?
More likely Allen has in mind here a dialogue between a
Habermasian and a ‘subaltern subject’ who is not a postcolonial theo-
rist. Here again, however, the figure of the ‘subaltern’ or ‘postcolo-
nial subject’ is highly indeterminate; Allen runs the risk of simply
using this figure as a foil in the argument against Habermas. Some
postcolonial subjects are pious religious believers; others are radical
feminists, Marxists and so forth. One certainly does not know what
an interlocutor’s deepest convictions are until one engages in serious
conversation. But what exactly is the concrete context for possibly

6 
More generally, see McCarthy (2009).
262  f  Jeffrey Flynn

treating someone as developmentally inferior? The worry seems to

be that specific non-Western interlocutors who are not virtuosos of
reflexivity would either be excluded from the start or, if they are
engaged at all, not be taken seriously by Habermasians. This is an
important worry. But this concern about exclusion does not iden-
tify a problem distinctive to Habermas’ theory. It differs little from
the difficulty that any marginalized group has in getting its voice
heard within a discourse dominated by elites who do not share their
perspectives or interests.7 Habermas’ theory of modernity is less the
source of that exclusion than the highly reflective nature of the dis-
course of modernity itself.
As for possibly taking less highly reflective non-Western partici-
pants seriously – and in this respect, those interlocutors would not
differ from less highly reflective Western participants – Allen cites
Saba Mahmood’s now-classic study of the Islamic revival in Egypt to
spell out the kind of openness to the other she has in mind. Recall,
however, that Mahmood is a trained anthropologist engaging in a
highly demanding practice of bracketing her own commitments for
the sake of understanding others. She does not advocate abandoning
one’s liberal or progressive commitments entirely (Mahmood 2005:
39), and she acknowledges how difficult it was to work through her
own sentiments of ‘repugnance’ regarding practices that required a
subordinate status for women (ibid.: 37–8). What makes her work so
illuminating is the way she thematizes, as she puts it, ‘this encounter
between the texture of my own repugnance and the textures of the
lives of the women I worked with’ (ibid.: 38).
Of course, one way that voices like those of the women Mahmood
studies get heard in the global discourse of modernity is through
Mahmood’s own highly influential work. More to the point I want
to make, however, is that Allen takes a standard of openness drawn
from one context – a demanding ethnographic practice grounded in
the aim of understanding the other without distortion – and applies
it in another context – an academic practice in which competing
theories of modernity are being debated. This leads Allen to ask the
open-ended question of whether a Habermasian could really be open
to unlearning in a process of dialogue if they do not take a stance
closer to Mahmood’s. But context matters. The degree to which one
is willing to defend one’s metanormative stance in a debate among

On this point, see Allen (2016: 152–9) regarding Gayatri Spivak’s

7 

work, and the exchange between Olsen (2014) and Forst (2014).
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  263

theorists – a highly refined and demanding practice – simply does

not directly determine one’s degree of openness to others in more
mundane encounters. In the latter context, openness and humility
are embodied and displayed in concrete ways and conveying openness
and humility to those with whom you have fundamental disagree-
ments is no simple task. It requires ongoing attempts to reassure the
other that you are in fact trying as hard as possible to understand
them, and that you are bracketing your metanormative commitments
for the sake of dialogue. Any theorist, Habermasian or otherwise,
will find this challenging.
This is not to say that Allen has not raised an important point
about respect for one’s interlocutors in intercultural dialogue. My
point is rather that her critique misses the mark insofar as it aims to
show that Habermas fails to account for the insights of postcolonial
theorists who are critical of the notion of progress, by trying to show
that Habermas’ notion of progress is an obstacle to open and inclu-
sive dialogue. If I have shown that the latter is not the case, that is
not to say that Habermas’ own engagement with postcolonial theory
has been sufficiently thorough-going. Nor is Habermas always clear
enough when addressing the question of audience and interlocu-
tors for various conversations. At times he can make it sound like
intercultural dialogue is something one does with non-Western par-
ticipants in contrast to defending one’s theory against objections,
which is something one does primarily with other Western theo-
rists (2013: 378, 366). The defensible version of his position would
rather be that one engages with professional colleagues – Western
or non-Western – differently than one does when one engages in
the kind of intercultural dialogue he has in mind for generating a
consensus around principles of global justice that are in the equal
interest of all.

Genealogy and Dialogue

A similar set of issues have arisen in more recent critical responses
to Habermas’ genealogy in Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie.
Even some of Habermas’ most sympathetic readers are not entirely
sympathetic to the story he tells there. Although the book covers
a lot of ground, a common reaction has been that Habermas left
many important things out, particularly when it comes to mar-
ginalized voices, both in the history of Western philosophy and
beyond (Bloch 2020, Lafont 2021, Benhabib 2021). In one reply,
Habermas points out that his genealogy ends at the beginning of
264  f  Jeffrey Flynn

the 20th century while many of those voices have made themselves
fully heard only in the latter half of that century (2021: 75). But
that suggests, rather surprisingly, that there were no such voices
earlier. I return to this below. But the more fundamental challenges
to Habermas’ approach are methodological, as Cristina Lafont notes
in arguing that the issue is more ‘about the normative implications
of the genre of genealogy itself’ than a

difficulty that could be remedied by focusing on anyone’s favorite

‘laundry list’ of exclusions that should have been included or addressed
(e.g., Christian debates about the human status of aborigines, coloni-
alism, the Haitian revolution, the Western civilizing mission, female
philosophers, philosophers of color, etc.) (Lafont 2021: 26).

Focusing on methodological objections, two stand out as touching on

my central question of whether core aspects of Habermas’ theory are
obstacles to intercultural dialogue and thereby hinder the decentring
of Eurocentrism.
First, in her critical remarks on Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie,
Seyla Benhabib provocatively links the issue of genealogy directly
with intercultural dialogue on human rights, asking how a story
about the development of postmetaphysical thinking in the West –
particularly one focused on Western learning processes – could pos-
sibly be helpful in laying the ground for dialogue in which Westerners
are open to learning from other cultural traditions (Benhabib 2021:
35). Habermas’ reply is instructive. He first reiterates his standard
point: Western philosophers must be fully open to being corrected
by others, and ‘every party’ to the conversation, ‘no matter how con-
vinced it may be of its position, must be willing to make a further
attempt to decenter its convictions’ in intercultural dialogue (2021:
73). More importantly, he restates his methodological aim in con-
structing the relation between intercultural dialogue and genealogy
the way he does in Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie. The only way
for intercultural dialogue to succeed, he argues, is for participants to
engage in some sort of ‘secular’ discourse that is uncoupled from the
participant’s respective background cultures. A necessary prepara-
tory step for that is a process ‘internal’ to each culture of coming to
terms with our globally shared modern context (the interpretation of
which is itself up for contestation). That is one – but only one – of the
roles his genealogy plays in relation to such dialogue. ‘That is why’, as
Habermas puts it, ‘Western philosophy would be well advised to put
its own house in order by assuring itself of the learning processes that
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  265

led it along the occidental path of development to the procedures of

postmetaphysical thinking, and thus to a decoupling of knowledge
from faith’ (2021: 73–4). In other words, if Western philosophers
cannot tell a plausible story about this decoupling process as a learn-
ing process – a kind of gain – within the West, there would be little rea-
son to recommend the result – postmetaphysical thinking as a mode
of contemporary thought suited to modern conditions – as a way of
framing intercultural dialogue at the global level.
This is where the second objection, Lafont’s pointed critique of
Habermas’ genealogical method, becomes relevant. Lafont highlights
the tension between telling a story that addresses the self-under-
standing of Europeans while at the same time making claims about
human rationality in general. Lafont writes,

How could Europeans and their traditions be the only relevant audi-
ence to address when making claims about human achievements of
rationality and, perhaps more importantly, the gains and costs involved
in those achievements? Moreover, if these achievements and experiences
have relevant consequences for future political projects – for example,
if they are supposed to justify the appropriateness of institutionalizing
a global democratic order in order to solve global ecological, economic,
and political problems – it can hardly be sufficient to confine oneself to
a European audience. The audience would need to be properly global
(Lafont 2021: 26).

Once again, as above, the problem of audience is being raised. In

this case, Lafont sums up the challenge to Habermas in the form of
a dilemma:

It seems equally problematic to claim that the book is addressed to

everyone than to claim that it is addressed only to Europeans. The first
claim would imply that the learning processes depicted in the book are
relevant to everyone, but its proper understanding only needs to take
the insights, experiences, and concerns of Europeans into account.
The second claim would imply that the learning processes in question
are exclusive achievements of Europeans and this is why only their
insights, experiences, struggles, and concerns need to be considered
(Lafont 2021: 26).

Either the audience for the claims about learning processes is solely
European – and exclusionary from the start – or the audience is
supposed to be universal, but then the story should not be exclu-
sively European. Both paths lead to exclusion. Lafont attributes the
266  f  Jeffrey Flynn

problem to the genre of genealogy itself, maintaining that it ‘is not

well suited for raising universal claims about human learning pro-
cesses and achievements of rationality’ (Lafont 2021: 26).
Lafont is right to focus on Habermas’ use of genealogy. He has not
always been clear about whether its aims are critical or affirmative,
or an attempt to combine both aims.8 And the question of audience
is crucial when it comes to genealogy. But there is also some ambigu-
ity in Lafont’s reference to the ‘relevant’ audience. There could be
more than one relevant audience, and, as is the case with any geneal-
ogy, the degree and kind of relevance may differ from one type of
reader to another. Another way to put this is that the genealogy can
be designed to play different roles. One role it plays is that of trying to
get other philosophers to view the development of postmetaphysical
thought the way Habermas does. Another is to get radical secularists
to abandon the aim of completely secularizing society (2019 I: 45).
But these are not the only possible roles.
This might be what Habermas has in mind when, in replying to
Lafont, he distinguishes three points: the book’s subject matter, its
addressees as a scholarly work, and how to think about the ‘results’ of
the book. Starting with the subject matter, as Habermas puts it, ‘what
I am talking about is clearly defined by its focus on a Western tradi-
tion’; just as clear, he maintains, is ‘to whom it is addressed, namely, pri-
marily to members of a global academic profession (and, as I hope, to
other interested readers as well)’ (2021: 71). In short, the genealogical
story Habermas tells about the development of Western philosophy
can be read by any philosopher, academic or intellectual anywhere in
the world. Those readers may agree or disagree with Habermas’ way
of telling the story about learning processes as traced through the his-
tory of Western philosophy. In that sense, Habermas is right to say
that it is a story about the West while the potential audience for the
book is global.
One of the more targeted audiences for the genealogical argu-
ment, however, is contemporary practitioners of philosophy as it has
developed as an academic discipline within the West. One aim of the
genealogy is to correct the self-understanding of philosophy within
that tradition – for example, to correct an overly secularistic stance
that is entirely negative towards the role and contributions of religion
within the Western tradition (Habermas 2013: 362–3). But that does
not restrict the general audience for the genealogy; it just targets and

8 
See the discussion in Allen (2013) and Habermas (2013).
 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue  F  267

hopes to have a specific effect on a particular kind of reader that it

would not have on readers who come to the text from a different
starting point.
Now consider what Habermas refers to as the ‘results’ of the book.
It may clarify things to think about how those results might ‘travel’
in different ways, so to speak. Habermas maintains that he ‘restricted
the results’ (2021: 71) in part because he is also proposing that the
basic outlines of postmetaphysical thinking be taken up as the com-
mon ground for carrying out an intercultural dialogue aimed at work-
ing out principles of justice for a constitutionalized world society. At
the crucial point of transitioning from genealogy to dialogue, however,
Habermas is not as clear as he needs to be. He makes it sound like the
story he tells about the origins and development of postmetaphysical
thinking is left behind entirely; the focus turns from origins-story to
contemporary context and the question becomes whether postmeta-
physical thinking can and should become part of a global background
consensus on which participants from every culture and society can
draw as they work out the principles of justice for a constitutionalized
world society. The ‘results’ of the scholarly genealogy are then up for a
fully inclusive discussion again, not just among academics who might
evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the story, but as part of a
fully inclusive discourse among participants from all cultures.
One way to view this is to say that once we turn to the global
discourse of modernity, Habermas makes a distinction between one
type of global audience who can and should critically interrogate his
theory (academics, for the most part) and another type of (broader)
global audience engaged in working out a possible background con-
sensus around postmetaphysical procedures for carrying out an
ongoing dialogue about substantive normative principles. But, as a
matter of principle, anyone anywhere can participate in either dis-
cussion, and so the distinction is better made with reference to the
subject matter than to the type of audience: the subject matter of
the first discussion is the historical development of postmetaphysi-
cal thinking in the West, while the subject matter of the second is
whether and in what form postmetaphysical thinking can be a non-
Eurocentric resource for framing the intercultural dialogue about
normative principles to guide a world society. Habermas is right to
distinguish the two topics and his reply to Lafont indicates that nei-
ther discussion is in principle directed solely at a restricted audience
(even if, as we saw, the genealogy may play different roles depending
on the audience).
268  f  Jeffrey Flynn

What Habermas still misses is that striving for inclusivity here can-
not just be about saying that the dialogue is open to all. As Lafont and
Benhabib point out, he also could have done more to make the genea-
logical story itself more inclusive. 9 There are two different modes of
inclusivity here. The first one, about dialogue, is more procedural since
it is about outlining how an ongoing process will try to include all
voices; the second one, the genealogy, is more substantive and so it can
be evaluated as to whether it made adequate attempts to tell the story
of Western philosophy itself in a way that includes voices that have
been marginalized. If we grant that the story is about the self-under-
standing of Western philosophy, about the gains and costs of carrying
it out in one way rather than another, it should go without saying that
Western philosophy has been deeply impoverished by the exclusion of
women and non-white people. While I have argued that Habermas’
genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking, properly understood, is not
necessarily exclusionary as a genre, Habermas cannot use that point to
excuse his not including marginalized voices as part of the story itself.
In this chapter I have addressed objections according to which
Habermas’ theoretical apparatus gets in the way of the open and
inclusive intercultural dialogue to which he is committed. My main
aim has been to clarify how his theory frames and intersects with dia-
logue in ways that further, rather than hinder, the aim of decentring
Eurocentrism through dialogue. But that is not the end of the story.
Additional attempts at genealogical and dialogical decentring will be
needed if we are to have any hope of overcoming entrenched forms
of Eurocentrism and achieving the ultimate goal of a more just and
inclusive world.

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Allen, Amy. 2013. ‘Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too: Habermas’s
Genealogy of Postsecular Reason’, in Craig Calhoun, Eduardo
Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), Habermas and
Religion, Polity, Cambridge, 132–53.
———. 2016. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations
of Critical Theory, Columbia University Press, New York.

9 
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———. 2014. Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A
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Habermas, Jürgen. 1997. ‘Der interkulturelle Diskurs über Menschenrechte.
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———. 2001. ‘Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights’, in The
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———. 2002. ‘A Conversation about God and the World: Interview
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Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, MIT Press,
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———. 2003. ‘The Relationship between Theory and Practice Revisited’,
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277–92.
———. 2008. ‘On the Architectonics of Discursive Differentiation’, in
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Cronin, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 77–97.
———. 2012. ‘The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia
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———. 2013. ‘Reply to My Critics’, in Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta
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Cambridge, 347–90.
———. 2019. Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, Band I: Die okzidentale
Konstellation von Glaube un Wissen, Band II: Vernünftige Freiheit.
Spurren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen, Suhrkamp, Berlin.
———. 2021. ‘Reply’, Constellations 28: 67–78.
Joas, Hans. 2013. The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of
Human Rights, Georgetown University Press, Washington.
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Lafont, Cristina. 2021. ‘Remarks of a Young Habermasian on Jürgen

Habermas’ Also a History of Philosophy’, Constellations 28: 25–32.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
McCarthy, Thomas. 2009. Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human
Development, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
———. 2012. ‘Response to Critics’, Symposia on Gender, Race and
Philosophy 8 (1): 1–12.
The Ministers and Representatives of Asian States. 1995. ‘The Bangkok
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Olson, Kevin. 2014. ‘Complexities of Political Discourses: Class, Power
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87–102.
Taylor, Charles. 1994. ‘Reply and Re-Articulation’, in James Tully (ed.),
Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in
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———. 1999. ‘Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights’,
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=en (accessed 5 July 2021).
Index
Adorno, Theodor xii, 174–76
aesthetic 159–60, 164–75
Allen, Amy 258–63
‘Arab Spring’ 15, 42–43, 245
Auch eine Geschichte der
Philosophie (Habermas) 229–
38, 243, 244, 257–58, 263–68
autonomy 3–5, 10, 14–15, 83, 98,
124–25, 132, 151, 163, 167;
public 4–6, 26, 28, 32–34,
40, 153; see also aesthetic;
democracy; freedom; publicity
An Awareness of What is Missing
(Habermas) 14, 190–91, 217
Axial Age 232–34, 239, 240,
247, 257
Bangkok Declaration 250–51
Benhabib, Seyla 28, 40–41, 121,
124, 264, 268
Benjamin, Walter 43, 114
Berger, Peter 183
Between Facts and Norms
(Habermas) 48, 57, 151,
179, 258
Bhabha, Homi K., 133–35, 141
Bilgrami, Akeel 209
Boeve, Lieven 18, 220–21
Bohman, James 32, 63, 96
Buchanan, Allen 49–50, 52
Buddhism 191, 232
Butalia, Urvashi 67
Canclini, García 120
care 134, 138–45
Casanova, José 209–11, 213, 219
Castoriadis, Cornelius 155
Chambers, Simone 90, 92
Chaves, Mark 183
China: Communist Party of
(CPC) 202, 203; deliberative
polls in 91, 94, 103; see also
mini-publics; and li xing 192–
200; People’s Daily of 202–3
Christianity 127, 182, 191, 221
citizenship: global 32, 33, 35, 37,
59, 62; national 76, 148–52,
161, 163, 185–86; see also
constitution; cosmopolitan;
democracy; state
civil rights 244–45
colonization and decolonization
3, 10–12, 79, 258; see
also Mignolo; modernity;
postcolonialism
communicative: action xii–xiii,
2, 97, 113, 114, 122, 124, 130,
178, 180–82, 189–90, 217;
freedom and power 61–63;
see also care; discourse; ethics;
morality; public reasoning and
publicity
constitution: American 31,
244–45; constitutional
democracy 237–38, 244–46,
252; constitutional patriotism
77, 80; see also cosmopolitan;
democracy; rights specific
entries; state
cosmopolitan: constitutionalism
and democracy 4–8, 25, 30–37,
49–60; politics ‘from below’
40–44; see also human rights;
Kant; United Nations
cross-civilizational learning
123–25, 233; see also learning
processes
decolonial, decolonization
see colonization and
decolonization; Mignolo;
modernity; postcolonialism

272  f Index
De la Cadena, Marisol 125
Delumeau, Jean 182
democracy 2–6, 237–38, 244–46;
deliberative 92, 94–99, 113–14,
150–52, 237–38; illiberal 246;
international 30–43, 49–62,
75–84; promotion 244–46; see
also autonomy; constitutional
democracy; cosmopolitan;
global; mini-publics; public
sphere; public reasoning and
publicity; state; transnational;
United Nations
Derrida, Jacques 12, 119, 134–37
discourse 2, 10, 75, 83, 96,
130–31, 141, 144–45, 242, 252;
see also care; communicative;
ethics; morality
dissonance 165–67
Dnyana Prabodhini (DP) 69
Domingues, José Maurício 119
Duffy, Eamon 182
Dussel, Enrique 116, 118,
119, 124
Egypt 262
Eisenstadt, Shmuel 123, 156–58,
166, 239
ethics 2–5, 11, 123, 125, 137–38;
see also care; communicative;
discourse; identity; morality
ethnocentrism 74, 94, 118, 124
ethnographic practice 262
Europe 1; Eurocentrism 78–81,
111–25, 233, 238, 249–68;
European Union (EU) 55,
61; see also postnational;
transnational
Fanon, Franz 117, 120
feminist 41; movement in India
81–83; see also hooks; Irigaray
Fishkin, James 93–95, 100, 103
Fortin-Melkevik, Anne 219
Foucault, Michel 132–33
Frankfurt School, xii–xiv 174;
reception in Latin America
113–15
Fraser, Nancy 82–83, 114, 133,
142–43
freedom, as non-domination
59–64; see also autonomy;
rationality and reason, rational
freedom
Freire, Paulo 112, 113, 120, 121,
124–25
functional differentiation and
rationality xii, 3, 14, 133, 144,
158–61, 182, 210; see also
rationality and reason
fundamentalism 72, 77, 111, 154,
162, 208–9
Fung, Archon 92
genealogy 232–35, 263–68
Giddens, Anthony 63
global: politics 4–6, 32–35,
39–43, 54–59, 244–48;
public 26, 28, 34–35, 40–40,
53, 62; reformulations of
Habermas’ theory 1–4,
18–19; see also colonization and
decolonization; cosmopolitan;
democracy; European Union;
public sphere; transnational;
United Nations
globalization 3, 28–30, 47, 52, 55,
66–69, 76–77, 119–20, 156,
162, 206, 221, 239, 245
Gorski, Philip 182–83
Gujarat riots 69
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
70–71, 122–23, 140, 231, 235
Held, David 49, 51–54
Heller, Agnes 164–65
Honneth, Axel 113–14, 140–45
hooks, bell 72–73
Horkheimer, Max xii, 174–76,
189–91, 200
Howard, Dick 27, 29
human rights 4, 25–26, 28, 29,
31, 33–44, 50–62, 78, 122–23,
241, 244–47, 249–56; see also
cosmopolitan; rights specific
entries

Hume, David 235
Hurrell, Andrew 63
identity 52, 69, 71, 73–77,
80–84, 115, 161–62; see also
ethics; socialization and social
integration
imaginary 115, 130, 136, 154–66
immigration 14, 68, 75–76,
186–87, 212, 214; see also
globalization
Inglehart, Ronald 210–13, 215
Ingram, David 36
instrumental rationality 2, 57,
137, 151, 174–81, 197,198,
235; see also functional
differentiation and rationality;
rationality and reason
intercultural dialogue 238–44,
246, 249–68
International Criminal Court 32,
33, 55, 59
international law 240; see also
cosmopolitan constitutionalism
and democracy; International
Criminal Court
Irigaray, Luce 66–67, 70–71
Islamic revival 262
Jaspers, Karl 232, 257
Kant, Immanuel 139–41,
151, 179, 198, 231, 235;
cosmopolitanism 25–30,
39–41, 47–49, 60, 134
‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace’
(Habermas) 32, 33, 48
knowledge 236
Kosovo 33
Krause, Sharon 139
Lafont, Cristina 264–68
laicism 212; see also religion;
secularization
Latin America 78, 112–21;
see also colonization and
decolonization; Eurocentrism;
Frankfurt School, reception
Index  F  273
in Latin America; Mignolo;
postcolonialism
learning processes xiii, 1, 5, 10,
15, 96, 100, 123–25, 148–50,
154–55, 192, 217, 234–35, 244,
245, 247, 257, 258, 264–66; see
also autonomy; communicative;
ethics; identity; modernity;
morality; socialization and
social integration
legitimacy see cosmopolitan;
democracy; liberal
Levinas, Emmanuel 116, 134
Li, Dazhao 203
Li, Victor 121
Liang, Shuming 189, 192–96,
198–99
liberal: democracy 4–5, 15, 79–
80, 139, 141, 244–46; rights
34–35, 39, 43, 57, 60–61,
244–46; see also cosmopolitan;
democracy; rights specific entries
li xing 192–203
Luhmann, Niklas 157n5, 165
Lukács, Gyorgy 174
Mahmood, Saba 142, 262
Mao, Zedong 201, 203
Maoist movement in Peru 120
Marcuse, Herbert 43, 114
Marx, Karl 61, 135, 151, 158–59,
197, 235
Marxism: in China 204; in Latin
America 113–19; Western 174
McCarthy, Thomas 121,
124–25, 261
media 30, 90, 98–99, 102–4, 121
Mendieta, Eduardo 112, 119, 121,
123–24
Michaelsen, Scott 115, 119
Mignolo, Walter 111–12,
115–21, 124
Milbank, John 211
mini-publics 92–104; see also
democracy, deliberative
modernity xii, 2, 11, 13–15,
112–13, 115–25, 134, 137, 142,
148–55, 174, 189–92, 232,
274  f Index
236, 237, 239–41, 247, 249,
256–58, 261–62; multiple
modernities 156–67, 239–40,
257–58; see also colonization
and decolonization;
functional differentiation
and rationality; instrumental
rationality; learning processes;
postsecularism; rationality and
reason; state
Mohamad, Goenewan 213,
218n4, 220
morality 2, 10–11, 34, 123, 137,
139–41, 176–78, 180, 189–91;
see also communicative;
discourse; ethics
nation-state see state
naturalism 235
natural law 235, 237
Niemeyer, Simon 97–99
Norris, Pippa 210–13, 215
outsiders, absolute 162
pathology 122–23, 137, 151, 154,
159, 174, 178
Pensky, Max 212
Pettit, Philip 61–62, 64
philosophy 230–37, 244, 263, 268
Pierce, Charles Sanders 235, 236
pluralism 49, 51, 154, 212,
215–16, 221, 241, 247, 254
political power 25, 36, 48, 52, 60,
63, 158n5; see also democracy;
state
postcolonialism: and ‘border
thinking’ 116–17, 120, 121,
124–25; deconstructive
131–35; Habermasian
response to 122–25, 136–40,
258–63; and Honneth on
care 140–45; Latin American
111–13; see also colonization
and decolonization; Bhabha;
Derrida; Mignolo; Spivak
postconventional 2, 10, 69,
73–75; see also autonomy;
communicative; ethics;
morality
postmetaphysical 14, 114, 190,
214; reason 235–44, 247, 258;
Postmetaphysical Thinking
(Habermas) 218; see also
communicative; modernity;
rationality and reason
postnational 4, 30, 51–52, 152;
The Postnational Constellation
(Habermas) 4, 29, 32, 49, 51,
57, 75–77, 96, 152; solidarity
75–85; see also cosmopolitan;
European Union; global;
transnational; United Nations
post occidentalism 123–25
postsecular 15, 17, 18, 152,
206–22; consciousness 214–19;
see also religion; secularization
problem-solving see learning
processes
public reasoning and publicity
26–28, 38, 47, 96, 131,
134, 137–38, 141, 144, 150,
203–4; see also cosmopolitan;
democracy; global; public
sphere
public sphere 2, 4–6, 15, 27, 28,
30, 31, 35, 47, 52–53, 55–57,
59, 63, 68, 82–84, 92–93,
97–99, 125, 151–52, 160,
164–67, 184–86, 191; see also
autonomy; public reasoning and
publicity; democracy; global;
mini-publics; political power;
religion
Quijano, Aníbal 116–17, 120
Radical Orthodoxy 211
rationality and reason 2, 10–11,
15, 34, 122, 137, 144, 149–52,
155, 158, 174–81, 185–87,
197–98, 213, 217–19; rational
freedom 235–38; rationalism
192, 197, 217, 219, 235, 242;
reasonable 92, 141, 195–203;
‘simplified reasons’ 99, 104;

‘subaltern reason’ 117; see also
autonomy; communicative;
democracy; discourse;
functional differentiation
and rationality; instrumental
rationality; li xing; morality;
philosophy; postcolonialism;
postmetaphysical; postsecular;
public reasoning and publicity;
science; secularization
Rawls, John 49, 52–53, 62, 114,
198, 216
Rehg, William 138n4
religion xiii, 1, 3, 5, 14–16, 18,
68, 73, 81, 112, 152, 154, 161,
181–82, 186, 190–91, 196,
199–200, 231–33, 240–43,
246, 266; in India 69, 71, 79;
religious freedom 246; see also
postsecular; secularization
‘Remarks on Legitimation
through Human Rights’
(Habermas) 251
republican see constitution;
freedom, as non-domination
right-wing movements in India
62–70, 83–85
rights see civil rights; constitution;
human rights; liberal, rights
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 60, 158
Rundell, John 214
Russell, Bertrand 196–99, 201
Said, Edward 135n3
Schmidt, Thomas 232
science 231, 232, 236, 242
secularization 14–15, 174–87,
207–11, 213, 217–19, 221, 255;
secular neutrality 242–44; see
also functional differentiation
and rationality; postsecular;
rationality and reason; religion
Shershow, Scott Cutler 115, 119
Shiv Sena party 69–70, 84
Simmel, Georg 160
Skirbekk, Gunnar 191
Slaughter, Anne-Marie 58
social contract 27, 52
Index  F  275
social imaginary see imaginary
socialization and social integration
73, 77, 96, 125, 131, 141–42,
145, 161, 234; see also autonomy;
communicative; ethics; identity;
imaginary; learning processes;
morality; postconventional;
rationality and reason
sovereignty 29–34, 53, 56, 58–63,
76, 163, 237
Spivak, Gayatri 134–35, 141, 143
state 2–5, 36–38, 43, 47, 51, 54–
56, 71, 76–86, 156–57, 161–64,
173, 175–77, 181–82; see also
citizenship; constitution;
democracy; globalization;
political power; public sphere;
sovereignty
supranational see cosmopolitan;
United Nations
sustainability 242–43
Taylor, Charles 123, 155n3,
161n6, 166, 184–85, 210n1,
253–54
terrorism 148, 163, 208
Thomas, Keith 182
Tibi, Bassam 208–9
Tomasello, Michael 234
totalitarianism 154, 156, 158n5,
162, 163, 166
translation 4, 11–12, 14–15,
18–19, 41, 43, 117, 166, 218
transnational 4, 37, 41–44,
51–53, 55–64, 96, 240; see
also cosmopolitan; democracy;
European Union; global;
globalization; postnational;
United Nations
United Nations (UN) 4–5, 31–40,
48, 55–58, 60, 61, 79, 152; see
also cosmopolitan; democracy;
global; human rights; Kant;
transnational
universality, xii–xiv 10–11, 15,
35, 41, 56, 58, 75, 83, 111–13,
120–23, 125, 130, 132, 135,
276  f Index
139, 141, 143–44, 149–50,
153, 200, 216–17, 229, 232–34,
238, 242, 244, 246, 247,
251–53, 258, 265–66; see also
communicative; cosmopolitan;
democracy; ethics;
ethnocentrism; modernity;
morality; postcolonialism;
rights specific entries
Weber, Max 167, 173–86,
197–98, 210
Weil, Felix 114
women’s violence in India 68–69;
see also feminist; right-wing
movements in India
World Values Survey 245
xenophobia 67, 80, 137