Constellations - 2012 - Benhabib - Habermas An Intellectual Biography by Matthew G Specter

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Book Review
Habermas: An Intellectual Biography. By Matthew G. Specter. (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 2010).
This is a good book, with a misleading title. It should have been more properly named
“The evolution of Habermas’s political and legal thought” –undoubtedly a title that would
not have been as equally attractive to publishers. Missing from Specter’s account is any
detailed analysis of Habermas’s encounters with other influential currents of thought such
as psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, systems theory, cognitive moral psychology, analytical
philosophies of language, action and science. In this respect, Specter’s book is very different
in intention and scope from other books on Habermas, such as those by Thomas McCarthy,
Stephen White, David Ingram, David Rasmussen and many others.1 Nevertheless, Specter
succeeds in covering new ground and in throwing new light on some aspects of Habermas’s
work, and in particular, Faktizität und Geltung (1992), which appeared in English in
1996 as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy.2
Specter deploys an unusual methodology. “Two major premises guided this study,”
he writes. “The first is that Habermas’s theoretical and political writings provide a unique
vantage point from which to consider major developments in postwar German history.
The second is that historical contextualization of Habermas within the postwar German
frame yields an entirely new understanding of what is central to his theoretical project.”
(203) Such contextualization enables us to see “that many of Habermas’s most challeng-
ing abstractions conceal hidden historical referents,” and “once decoded as references to
German historical experience, the most cryptic become revelatory.” (191) This methodologi-
cal vantage-point, which radically contextualizes Habermas’s thought in terms of the political
struggles, legal disputes, party politics and social movements of Germany from 1945 to 1992,
has its virtues as well as its limits.
Habermas himself has often acknowledged the historical caesura of 1945 as a German
intellectual; a date which Martin Matustik calls Habermas’s “existentially motivated philo-
sophical birthday.” (as cited in Specter, 6) Born in 1929, Habermas, along with many others
such as Kurt Sontheimer, Niklas Luhmann, Ralf Dahrendorf, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger,
Günter Grass, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, was recruited into the Hitler Youth and was sent
to help the antiaircraft artillery of western defenses. Dubbed the “Flakhelfer-Generation”
(the anti-aircraft support generation) they subsequently gave the new Federal Republic of
Germany its spiritual and intellectual anchor for decades. Specter decides to call Habermas’s
generation not the ‘45’ers but the ‘58’ers. (4) Not only does this term mark the ironical
distance of the older generation from the one that succeed it – the ‘68’ers – but it signals the
year in which Habermas’s political thought begins to take shape.
Habermas arrived at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1956, after he had
come to Adorno’s attention with his critique of Heidegger (Specter, 29 ff.) He had earned
his Ph.D. in philosophy with a dissertation on Schelling. His encounter with Heidegger’s
Nazism led him to search for new intellectual orientations. Although he had become fa-
miliar with Marcuse’s pre-1933 writings, the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of
the interwar years was “a sunken continent.” (30) Specter recounts that in the course of an
Constellations Volume 18, No 4, 2011.

C 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford
OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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590 Constellations Volume 18, Number 4, 2011
empirical research project dealing with students and participation, Habermas encountered
legal theory and its Weimar roots. Habermas then wrote an Introduction to Students and
Politics, entitled “The Concept of Political Participation,” which Adorno considered a “tour
de force.” Horkheimer was less impressed. Already irked by Habermas’s 1957 article, “Marx
and Marxism,” Horkheimer wrote to Adorno that “The word ‘revolution,’ probably under
your influence, has been replaced ‘by the development of formal democracy into material
democracy, of liberal democracy into social democracy’ . . . ” (33) Horkheimer proceeded
to reject Habermas’s Habilitationsschrift, “The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere.” Habermas’s tenure at the Institute was brief, from 1956 to 1959, and he left to work
with Wolfgang Abendroth in Marburg.
So far this narrative is not unknown –having first been told by Rolf Wiggershaus3 – but
reading these pages still gives one pause. So much of Habermas’s work has been interpreted
by so many, including myself,4 as recouping, reviving, and continuing the tradition of the
Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School that it is hard to accept that Horkheimer could be so
harsh on the talented young assistant. It is with the story of Habermas’s departure from the
Institute and his collaboration with Abendroth, that Specter’s narrative begins to unveil the
political history of the early decades of the Federal Republic and the battles over the new
constitution waged by the Social Democratic Party. “Three vexed conceptual relationships
preoccupied Habermas throughout his career: of state and civil society, of legality and
legitimacy, and of constitutionalism (Rechtstaatlichkeit) or the rule of law (Rechtstaat) and
democracy,” he writes. “All three problems stem from the peculiarities of German statism.”
(13) The SPD’s historic conference at Bad Godesberg5 in November 1959 was the first
in a long series of political events in the history of the Bonn Republic, and its eventual
transformation into the Berlin Republic after German unification in 1989–90, that deeply
marked Habermas’s thought and showed these antinomies to be at work in the social and
political culture of the FRG.
After SPD’s defeats in the polls in 1953 and 1957 and many ensuing debates, the Party
adopted a new platform in 1959, deciding to transform itself from a working-class party into a
people’s party (Volkspartei). The Party distanced itself from Orthodox Marxism and stressed
that the choice for socialism was an ethical, individual one, not guaranteed by any inexorable
historical movement. The SPD Executive then demanded that the Sozialistischer Deutscher
Studentenbund (SDS) accept this platform. Specter writes: “On October 8, 1961, shortly
after completing Transformation, Habermas joined Abendroth and political scientist Osip
Flechtheim in attending the long-planned founding of a group of ‘sponsors’ of the German
Socialist Students League (SDS) opposed to the Godesberg reforms.” (37) In November
1961 the SPD expelled both members of the SDS and their sponsors, including Habermas
and Abendroth. (39)
Even more significant for the future development of Habermas’s thought was the debate
between Abendroth and Ernst Forsthoff over whether the German Basic Law contained “a
‘decision’ for a social welfare state with a capitalist basis or a socialist democracy.” The
majority of conservative jurists, either disciples of Carl Schmitt or influenced by him, such as
Wilhelm Grewe, Ernst-Rudolf Huber and Ernst Forsthoff, argued, citing a phrase of Schmitt
himself, that “ . . . the word Sozial remains a foreign word in German.”6 Forsthoff followed
Schmitt and claimed that the Rechstaat was not a Sozialstaat. Abendroth, by contrast, argued
that the basic rights enumerated in the German Basic Law need not be construed narrowly as
a “ . . . restorative or conservative endorsement of the existing social and economic order;”
they “ . . . [held] open the possibility of . . . enlarged social rights and another system of social
order.” (as quoted in Specter, 42)

C 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Book Review 591
The debate was not the first time that Habermas encountered the residues of the authori-
tarian legacy of the German mandarins in the culture and politics of the new Bonn Republic.
His ‘obsession with the law’ (Ulrich Preuss’s phrase) and his regret for not having studied
law (in a private communication to Matthew Specter on June 7, 2005, as cited in Specter,
22) may well go back to these early years.
Fascinating as these episodes are, what do they really add to our understanding of The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS)? Specter acknowledges that The
Structural Transformation is a break with the view of the Enlightenment presented in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1947 (27). Yet it is also much more than that. In Habermas’s
concept of the ‘reasoning public’ of the 18th century French salons, Tischgesellschaften in
Germany, and workers’ associations in Great Britain, and in his reading of the Kantian
concept of ‘publicity,’ one senses in nuce the beginnings of the concept of ‘communicative
reason.’7 Publicity, deliberation among peers considered as equals, the free exchange of
opinions, new ideals of human intimacy and brotherhood are dimensions of Enlightenment
culture that Adorno and Horkheimer considered either too weak or too mystificatory to be
able to withstand the destructive tides of instrumental reason.
There are other significant interlocutors of this work: the neo-Aristotelian and civic
republican traditions of Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Hannah Arendt, to whom Habermas
refers in the very first pages (STPS, pp. 3–5; 251). Habermas’s concept of the public sphere
is a modernist transformation of Arendt’s concept of ‘public space,’ which, as is well-known,
Arendt claimed to have been eclipsed by the ‘rise of the social’ in modernity. None of this
is mentioned by Specter. Throughout the book, there is no sense of the significance of
either Arendt or, for that matter, of Gadamer8 for the early Habermas. The neglect of this
tradition then leads Specter to argue that Habermas “invented” the categories of ‘work’
and ‘interaction.’ (123) The origin of these categories lies not only in Hegel’s Jena Writings
(1805–1807), but in the Aristotelian distinction between praxis and poeisis, discussed vividly
by Gadamer, and reformulated by Arendt into the threefold distinction between action, labor,
and work in The Human Condition.9 By embedding Habermas’s writing so narrowly within
the context of fascinating legal debates and political struggles in the FRG, Specter misses
the broader philosophical currents in which Habermas was also swimming.10 His reading of
The Structural Transformation is one of a number of cases –the other is the interpretation of
the Theory of Communicative Action (1981), where the limits of his methodology become
clear.
According to Specter, “elaborated over the course of the decade, the fundamental insights
of ‘universal pragmatics’ culminated in a theory of justice as fairness in communication.”
(126) But this conflates the norms of a just social order that would result from practical
discourses with the normative preconditions of a discourse situation, which indeed, must
themselves be governed by some lifeworld understanding of fairness in the distribution of
speech-acts, chances for questioning the agenda of discourses and the rules governing them,
etc. Some describe this structure of practical discourses as a vicious circle (E. Tugendhat); I
see this as an expression of the inevitable hermeneutic circle of practical reason, and together
with Ken Baynes, I distinguish norms that inform discourses from norms of social justice
that recursively are agreed upon in practical discourses.11 I am not critiquing Specter for
not addressing the normative puzzles that have plagued an entire generation of Habermas
scholars, such as, what is the relationship of universal pragmatics to the ‘ideal speech
situation’? Of the ideal speech situation to communicative ethics? Is communicative ethics
a theory of justice, a theory of universalist morality or rather, a meta-theory of normative
justification? These questions do not interest Specter; but by quickly glossing over these

issues in barely four pages and then situating The Theory of Communicative Action in
the heated atmosphere of kidnappings by the Red Army Faction, and allegations by the
CDU that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School had inspired terrorism, one misses
the equally decisive debates in analytical speech-act philosophies; sociological theories of
symbolic interaction and phenomenological concepts of the Lebenswelt which were just as
significant–and I would say surely more significant– for the genesis of this work than the
kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a Cologne industrialist, by the RAF. (128)
I have so far outlined some limitations of Specter’s methodology. What, then, are its
virtues? Given the general drift of his argument, the interpretation culminates in a reading
of Between Facts and Norms (171–201). Specter calls this work an epitaph and a manifesto:
an “epitaph for the Bonn Republic –a résumé of the achievements and limits of West
German constitutionalism– and manifesto for the Berlin Republic.” (171) Rather than reading
this work as the end of Critical Theory, an embrace of liberal constitutionalism, and a
relinquishing of the utopian horizon of critique, as many have done, Specter argues that this
work represents “an important restatement of the radical democratic project of reform to
which Habermas has been committed since the 1960’s.” (172) Between Facts and Norms “is
profoundly rooted in German intellectual traditions and its tumultuous political landscape.”
(173) In this tumultuous landscape, “Habermas positioned himself in the role of friendly critic
of the left and determined opponent of the right.” (154) Specter succeeds in showing that there
are no ‘breaks’ in Habermas’s preoccupation with law, constitutionalism, the future of the
social welfare state, etc. Yet even when there may not have been such breaks–and I agree with
him that there are few, if any– the systematic question as to what the relationship is between
the crisis theory of system and life-world as presented in The Theory of Communicative
Action and the deliberative democratic normative model of Between Facts and Norms,
remains. It would not be altogether implausible to point out that the current generation of
critical theorists is itself deeply divided among those who believe in continuing the crisis
model of critiquing late capitalism (Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser) on the one hand, and
those who continue critique in the mode of normative reconstructions of liberal constitutional
and democratic theory, on the other (Hauke Brunkhorst, Rainer Forst, William Scheuerman,
and myself).
The heart of the argument in Between Facts and Norms is the equiprimordiality thesis:
the Gleichursprünglichkeit of rights guaranteed by the rule of law and popular sovereignty.
(118–131) How can one do justice to the insight of liberalism that the autonomy of the
modern citizen must entail a domain of private liberty protected from interference by the
state, while not reducing rights to the model of private property? How to respect individual
legal autonomy, with its guarantees of privacy, intimacy and moral choice, while defining
rights as reciprocal entitlements which consociates grant one another in a constitutional
republic? Habermas’s ingenious move is to critique liberalism for its ‘pre-political’ concept
of rights, while critiquing civic republicanism for a naı̈ve vision of a strongly ethically
integrated society.
It becomes clear from reading Specter that Habermas’s preoccupation with this cen-
tral question of modern liberal political thought had some of its origins in his critique of
German Ordo-liberalism. Habermas identified a tradition, beginning in the early nineteenth-
century (Savigny, Puchta, and Winscheid) and continuing to the 1950’s, namely that of
Ordo-liberalism, so named after the journal, Jahrbuch für Ordnung von Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft.12 “Law that treats rights as ‘possessions’ granted by the state rather as some-
thing [that] emerged from citizens’ recognition of each other as equals under the law,”
explicates Specter, “is a signature of the German statist approach to law.” (Specter, 192,

Book Review 593
paraphrasing Habermas, BFN, 88–89) During the Bad Godesberg debates, which were
responsible for the SPD turning to the right, the Ordo-liberals, argued Habermas, “only
rehabilitated [an] individualistically truncated understanding of rights.” (BFN 87) Knowing
this context certainly helps in understanding the vehemence with which Habermas rejects
natural rights views, and for that matter, any Dworkinian view of “rights as trumps.” It helps
to know that it is not only, or may be even principally, the liberal tradition from Hobbes to
Kant, that Habermas had in mind. Rather, against Ordo-liberals he is concerned to assert the
private autonomy of the modern legal subject without reducing this to the protection of an
order of property rights immune to regulation by the will of the democratic sovereign. While
it is certainly crucial to differentiate private property rights from private legal autonomy,
this still does not help us evaluate the plausibility of Habermas’s “equiprimordiality” thesis.
The heart of that argument is the construction of the logical genesis of right, which begins
“ . . . by applying the discourse principle to the general right to liberties –a right constitutive
of the legal form as such– and ends by legally institutionalizing the conditions for a discursive
exercise of political autonomy.” (BFN, 121–122) Some would argue that “the general right to
liberties,” which Habermas interprets as the “right to the greatest possible measure of equal
individual liberties,” must contain sufficient constraints such that the rights of “recalcitrant
minorities” (distinguished through gender, ethnicity, language, and sexuality) are protected
from domination by democratic majorities, since one cannot assume that the actual, empirical
democratic sovereign will always be wise and fair in its decisions.13
Could it be then that my basic complaint against Specter is that he is not a philosopher but
a historian of ideas? He is not interested in judging the validity or plausibility of Habermas’s
ideas but rather, of spelling out their origins and resonances within the historical, legal, and
political evolution of recent German history. Such a simple division of labor between genesis
and validity, history and philosophy, is not what Specter aspires to. Remember his claim that
“many of Habermas’s most challenging abstractions conceal hidden historical referents,”
and “once decoded as references to German historical experience, the most cryptic become
revelatory.” (191) Specter is claiming that to understand Habermas one must understand
him in the context of the German historical experience from 1945 onwards, and even more,
that it is this context that will yield a sense of “what is central to his theoretical project.”
I think that the first part of this claim is trivially true yet not innocent, while the second is
false. Without understanding the “linguistic turn” (Richard Rorty) of twentieth-mid-century
analytical philosophy, without understanding the bomb-shell like explosion of John Rawls’
1972 A Theory of Justice upon the landscape of an arid post-war political philosophy,
and without understanding the influence of Karl Otto-Apel’s rereading of the American
pragmatists in general, and of Charles Sanders Peirce in particular, on Habermas, no amount
of contextualizing will get us to the heart of Habermas’s philosophical project.14
In his concluding pages, Specter writes: “Habermas’s interest in American pragmatism
and appropriation of John Austin’s speech-act theory have led many readers to consider him a
bridge-builder between the spheres of Anglo-American analytic and Continental philosophy.
Habermas’s description of the opening without reserve, too, addressed the German reception
of American philosophers in particular. This book has shown, by contrast, that Habermas
is preeminently a German thinker, but not in an essentialist sense.” (208) Here we see the
dangers of radical contextualization: to read Habermas as a German thinker,15 is to deny that
he is also a universal thinker, whose influence and reputation encompasses the globe.
Certainly, the fact that Habermas’s Kleine politische Schriften now encompass eleven
volumes does not always make it easy to sort out the different hats he is wearing as philosopher
and as a public intellectual. These writings also reveal that for Habermas, a Germany without

Europe is inconceivable, and that the transition to the Berlin Republic means the reanchoring
of Germany in the unfinished – and today increasingly fragile – project of Enlightenment
cosmopolitanism.
Specter’s book is a work of deep scholarship and judiciousness in guiding us through some
of the most critical junctures at which Habermas’s dual roles – as a public intellectual and
philosopher – have intersected. Yet some clearer methodological self-consciousness about
the limits as well as virtues of his contextualist approach would have prevented Specter from
making claims that he cannot deliver upon.
NOTES
1. All page references in the text to Specter, are to the hardcover edition. See Thomas McCarthy,
The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979); Stephen White, The
Cambridge Companion to Habermas. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Stephen K.
White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas. Reason, Justice and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988); David Ingram, Habermas. Introduction and Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2010); David Rasmussen, Reading Habermas (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell,
1990).
Specter’s biography is closest in intention to Matustik’s with whom he disagrees about why Habermas
left the University of Frankfurt to go to the Max-Planck Institute in Starnberg. See Martin Beck-Matustik,
Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), p. 93 and
Specter’s discussion, pp. 87 ff. Cf. also A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
2. Translated by William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). All references in the text are to
this edition.
3. See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Significance, trans. Michael
Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 554–556.
4. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical
Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
5. http://einestages.spiegel.de/static/topicalbumbackground/768/das_godesberger_programm.html,
accessed 11 July 2011.
6. Carl Schmitt, “Nehmen, Teilen, Weiden: ein Versuch der Grundfrage jeder Sozial- und Wirtschaft-
sordnung vom Nomos her richtig zu stellen,” [1953], in: Rechtstaatlichkeit und Sozialstaatlichkeit: Aufsätze
und Essays, ed. Ernst Forsthoff (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), p. 104, as cited by
Specter, 41.
7. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Cat-
egory of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989; originally published as Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kat-
egorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962). Referred to in the text as STPS.
As is well-known, the debate about the public sphere was not only of German provenance but was started
in the USA with Walter Lippmann’s books Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1922) and The
Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1925) to which John Dewey responded in The Public and
its Problems [1927] (Ohio: Swallow Press of Ohio University Press, 1954). A lucid account of the Lippmann
and Dewey debate is given by Christopher Lasch, in: The True and Only Heaven. Progress and Its Critics
(New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1991), pp. 363–368.
8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik
(Tübingen: Verlag Mohr, 1960); Truth and Method, trans. by Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New
York: Seabury Press, 1975). Cf. for a helpful compilation of texts on the Habermas-Gadamer debate: The
Hermeneutic Tradition, ed. by Gayle E. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Stony Brook, New York: SUNY Press,
1990). On the importance of hermeneutics, see Habermas, “Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik,”
in: Jürgen Habermas, Kultur und Kritik. Verstreute Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 246–301
and Thomas A. McCarthy, “Rationality and Relativism: Habermas’s Overcoming of Hermeneutics,” in:
Habermas. Critical Debates, edited by John B. Thompson and David Held, including a “Reply to my
Critics,” by Jürgen Habermas (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), pp. 57–79.
9. For the Aristotelian formulation see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutic, Religion and Ethics,
trans. by Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Idee

Book Review 595
des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles (Heidelberg: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften,
1978); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973 [1958]),
8th edition, pp. 12–17; 79–243. See also Richard J. Bernstein for a lucid exploration of intra-paradigmatic
conversations between these traditions, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976).
10. STPS also draws from Schmitt’s work in its sociological analysis. Habermas outlines the trans-
formation of the public sphere from the 18th century reasoning public to the parliament of negotiations and
deal-making at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth-centuries, and eventually to its
decline into the form of a ‘culture-consuming public’ in the post-WW-II period. The sociological model is
pessimistic and shows no anchoring of the idealized model of the reasoning public in concrete social trans-
formations. Habermas combines the Kulturpessimismus of the Frankfurt School with Schmitt’s diagnosis of
the crisis of parliamentarism. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Die Geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parliamentaris-
mus (1923), translated and with an Introduction by Ellen Kennedy, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); cited by Habermas in STPS, p. 205: “The parliament therefore tends
to become a place where institution-bound appointees meet to put their predetermined decisions on record.
Carl Schmitt notes a similar trend in the Weimar Republic. The new status of the delegate is no longer
characterized by participation in a public engaged in nonpartisan rational debate.”
11. See Seyla Benhabib, “In the Shadow of Aristotle and Hegel. Communicative Ethics and Current
Controversies in Practical Philosophy,” in: S. Benhabib, Situating the Self. Gender, Community and Post-
modernisn in Contemporary Ethics (Routledge and Polity: New York and London, 1992), pp. 30–33 and
Kenneth Baynes, “The Liberal/Communitarian Controversy and Communicative Ethics,” Philosophy and
Social Criticism, vol. 14, Nos. 3–4 (1988), pp. 304 ff.
12. ORDO: Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Annual Review for the Order
of Economy and Society) established in 1948 and edited by Friedrich Hayek, Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm,
Wilhelm Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow (cited by Specter, 193).
13. See George Kateb’s analysis of human rights in the light of concepts of human dignity and
stature, in: Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2011), 28–113;
for continuing explorations of the paradoxes of the “equiprimordiality” thesis, see Bonnie Honig, Emergency
Politics: Paradox, Law and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), and Seyla Benhabib,
Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times (London: Polity Press, 2011).
14. Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, edited and with
an Introduction by R. Rorty (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1970); John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Karl Otto-Apel, Transformation
der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976); selected English translation: Toward a Transformation of
Philosophy, by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1980).
15. Is Habermas a German thinker in the same sense in which Heidegger was a German thinker? I
do not think so.
Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at
Yale University. Her books include Another Cosmopolitanism. Hospitality, Sovereignty and
Democratic Iterations (2006).


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14678675, 2011, 4, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2011.00660.x by University Of Regina, Wiley Online Library on [09/12/2022].

Habermas: An Intellectual Biography. By Matthew G. Specter. (Cambridge, UK:

Constellations Volume 18, No 4, 2011.

OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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