The Habermas Machine

Have you heard of the Habermas Machine?

In fact, have you heard of Jürgen Habermas? Still with us, and like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, he is one of the mighty antique philosophers of our time. MacIntyre is 96, Habermas is 95 and Taylor is 93. I was just in a Comprehensive Exam for a Ph.D. student and one of the examiners mentioned all three names. Well! It’s the zeitgeist. No one half that age is at all well known. But we are all familiar with our ancients. Alain Badiou is 88. Georgio Agamben, that hero of COVID-19, is a mere stripling at 82.

Anyhow, Habermas.

Boring.

Private Eye’s page 94 + 1.

He is basically the house philosopher of post-war Germany and the European Union. He was a sort of Marxist, and a sort of Frankfurt Schooler, and a sort of radical, but also a sort of liberal. He was acceptable enough to cross swords with John Rawls, that high saint of boring American political thought. Scruton did him down in Thinkers of the New Left, in which, I paraphrase, Scruton said that Habermas had clotted prose and the mind of a bank manager who happened to be on the Left: bureaucratic. I have always thought that Habermas was, in fact, the sort of figure who was invented to do the Weberian job of educating the unpolitical Germans: but, oddly, since we like our Germans, was brought across the Atlantic to tell Americans things they might like