Professor Benhabib and Jürgen Habermas Raymond Geuss Originally published on Medium by the Hannah Arendt Center, 6 July 2019.
When I have been invited, I have published things on the internet, but I don’t myself regularly read anything published there. However, yesterday two friends pointed out Seyla Benhabib’s reply to my piece on Habermas, and I thought those who have been following the discussion might find the following clarifications helpful. Professor Benhabib is the author of what seems to me to be the best philosophical study of the thought of Jürgen Habermas, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, and she is an internationally recognized expert on his writing. She is entirely correct, in her recent response to an article I published in the Point, to note that I was not the first to introduce Habermas (or, for that matter, “The Critical Theory”—she tends to use these as if they were interchangeable expressions, although for me they are distinct) to English-speaking thought. This claim is made in the preface added to my essay by the editors of the Point; I was not shown this text or consulted about it in advance. I would not consider myself at all to be a scholar of the works of Habermas. In fact, in 1976 or 1977 when I was writing the manuscript which I eventually published as The Idea of a Critical Theory, it was the publisher’s idea to add the subtitle Habermas and the Frankfurt School. I had conceived the work without reference to any particular figure, and had three aims. First, I was interested in rehabilitating the concept of “ideology,” which at that time was widely criticized. I thought that these criticisms were unwarranted, and motivated by a confusion of different senses in which the term “ideology” was used. Second, I was interested in the idea of people having and pursuing or failing to pursue their own ‘real interests’. Third, I was keen to try to suggest that there could be forms of “enlightenment” that were not in any sense analogous to scientific theories but were nonetheless important. I merely mentioned this third point at the very end of the book, without developing it. Despite the book’s external success, I thought that on my own terms it was a huge failure, if only because I discovered that several careful philosophers (including Dick Rorty) thought I was trying to do the reverse of what was my intention; namely, that I was trying to discredit the use of the term “ideology.” In addition, others thought I was asserting dogmatically that there were real interests that existed independently of their construction by agents. Finally, no one seemed to pick up the point about enlightenment and science/knowledge at the very end, which seemed to me to be key.
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