...by intellectual historian Peter Gordon (Harvard), who overstates, as is common, Habermas's philosophical importance, but tries to tell a narrative connecting the philosophical work and Habermas's admirable role as a genuine public intellectual. A key bit:
The project [of refashioning modern social theory] would demand that Habermas reconsider the major philosophers of world-rationalization—Kant, Hegel, Weber—to wrest from their theories all that might enrich a new model of truly human freedom while dispensing with their impoverished conception of reason as a mere instrument for the mastery of nature. Unlike his teachers Horkheimer and Adorno, the returned émigrés who presided over the new generation from their posts at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Habermas was unwilling to concede that the Enlightenment itself was caught in a bad dialectic that sabotaged the human bid for emancipation. But to demonstrate what was mistaken in that grim narrative would demand that the entire edifice of Enlightenment rationality be rebuilt from the ground up. The very armature of the Enlightenment tradition had to be excavated and reset, like a bone that had once broken and never properly healed.
Seen in this light, one can perhaps understand how the two roles that Habermas has played throughout his life are parts of a single calling. The public intellectual who advocated for greater democracy and transparency in contemporary Germany could only succeed if he also plunged deep into the philosophical tradition, in which he could discover the conceptual resources for grounding his own practice of public criticism.
It is a tad curious that an intellectual historian, apparently interested in the history of European philosophy, would characterize Kant and Hegel as committed to a merely instrumental conception of reason. But putting that to one side, what do readers make of the review? Signed comments will be very strongly preferred.
