Christopher Zurn

Christopher F. Zurn - Perspectives on Habermas - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 274-275 Book Review Perspectives on Habermas Lewis Edwin Hahn, editor. Perspectives on Habermas. New York: Open Court, 2000. Pp. xiv + 586. Paper, $29.95. This collection of essays on the wide-ranging body of thought produced by Jürgen Habermas over the course of close to fifty years represents a significant lost opportunity. Although originally planned as a volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series, in 1999 Habermas pulled out of the project because, as Hahn tells us, "of other events in his life" . Volumes in this series have typically provided unique and valuable resources: not only quality secondary essays by leading contemporary philosophers, but essay-by-essay responses by the featured philosopher, as well..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 (2002) 274-275 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Perspectives on Habermas Lewis Edwin Hahn, editor. Perspectives on Habermas. New York: Open Court, 2000. Pp. xiv + 586. Paper, $29.95. This collection of essays on the wide-ranging body of thought produced by Jürgen Habermas over the course of close to fifty years represents a significant lost opportunity. Although originally planned as a volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series, in 1999 Habermas pulled out of the project because, as Hahn tells us, "of other events in his life" (ix). Volumes in this series have typically provided unique and valuable resources: not only quality secondary essays by leading contemporary philosophers, but essay-by-essay responses by the featured philosopher, as well as an intellectual autobiography, and a useful bibliography. Unfortunately, the present volume not only lacks Habermas's responses to the contributors, an intellectual autobiography, and a bibliography of his works, but is also comprised of essays whose collective quality can only be considered notably erose, containing essays of both significant and questionable value.First the bad news. Of the twenty-nine essays just over half are not worth reading for those either new to, or long familiar with, Habermas. The great majority of these present significantly distorted or confused accounts of different aspects of his work, often apparently based on little or no familiarity with the primary source material, and close to none with the significant body of secondary literature. Some authors seem not to have read anything published in English translation by Habermas past 1973 or so, even though his two most significant works--The Theory of Communicative Action (1984 and 1987) and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996)--appeared later. Ignorance of the second of these is especially pronounced throughout and regrettable since many patently false claims about Habermas's positions on issues in political philosophy, legal theory, and social theory could have been avoided by consulting Between Facts and Norms, rather than deriving "Habermas's position" aprioristically from what one thinks he might say. Other essays present particularly nasty and personalized invective in the place of argument: one author for example, calls Habermas's political opinions "pathological," "inhumane," "exhibiting a seriously flawed sensitivity," and so "beastly" as to raise "profound questions about the writer's claims to superior rationality."The good news is that close to half of the volume contains important and stimulating work. Some of the best of this performs the crucial tasks of sensitively explicating Habermas's ideas, carefully critiquing them where needed, and finally extending the reformed ideas to new domains, new problems, and new issues. Exemplary in this way is James Bohman's [End Page 274] piece on reviving the project of ideology critique by using Robert Brandom's pragmatic inferentialism to cash out Habermas's notion of systematically distorted communication. Other useful articles on broadly epistemic themes include those by David Detmer, Richard Palmer, Carlos Pereda, and Beth Singer.Two essays--by Enrique Dussel and James Marsh--represent broad and incisive, yet sympathetic, critiques of Habermas for not sufficiently carrying through on the emancipatory promise of critical theory. Both point to a certain preoccupation in Habermas's work in moral and political theory with issues of rationality, proceduralism, and ideal justification that seems to have crowded out a practical focus on issues of poverty, inequality, and exploitation, especially as these are articulated through the emerging structures of global capitalism and along the fault lines separating West and East, North and South. Concurring in political upshot, but drawing on Habermas's new form of social contractarian argument, David Ingram argues provocatively that Habermas's ideals of social equality require much more radical forms of "market socialism" and direct democratic self-organization than Habermas himself is willing to endorse. Douglas Kellner's outstanding article gives a clear overview of Habermas's changing conception of the public sphere and its role in democracy, presents various criticisms of that, and argues for an account conceptually and evaluatively adequate to the emergence...

Splitsville USA argues that it’s time for us to break up to save representative democracy, proposing a mutually negotiated, peaceful dissolution of the current United States of America into several new nations. It begins by examining the United States’ democratic predicament, a road most likely headed for electoral authoritarianism, with distinct possibilities of ungovernability and violent civil strife. Unlike others who share this diagnosis, Zurn presents a realistic picture of how we can get to reform and what it would involve. It is argued that “Splitsville” represents the most plausible way for American citizens to continue living under a republican form of government. Despite recent talk of secession and civil war, this book offers the most extensive treatment yet of the issues we need to think through to enable a peacefully negotiated political divorce.

In this book, Christopher F. Zurn shows why a normative theory of deliberative democratic constitutionalism yields the best understanding of the legitimacy of constitutional review. He further argues that this function should be institutionalized in a complex, multi-location structure including not only independent constitutional courts but also legislative and executive self-review that would enable interbranch constitutional dialogue and constitutional amendment through deliberative civic constitutional forums. Drawing on sustained critical analyses of diverse pluralist and deliberative democratic arguments concerning the legitimacy of judicial review, Zurn concludes that constitutional review is necessary to ensure the procedural requirements for legitimate democratic self-rule through deliberative cooperation. Claiming that pure normative theory is not sufficient to settle issues of institutional design, Zurn draws on empirical and comparative research to propose reformed institutions of constitutional review that encourage the development of fundamental law as an ongoing project of democratic deliberation and decision.

In this dissertation, I argue that the development of individual identity should be understood in terms of the intersubjective acquisition of diverse forms of interactive competence, that such a conception can allay concerns about the historical, ethical, and institutional specificity of the structures of personal identity, and that such a conception plays an important role in critical social theory's project of a substantive diagnosis and assessment of social pathologies in complex, pluralistic societies. ;I begin by clarifying the intersubjectivist conception of individual development put forward by Jurgen Habermas in terms of the progressive acquisition of various interactive competences. On this largely neo-Kantian model, autonomy is defined as an agent's capacity for rational accountability: an autonomous person is prepared to defend, at ever higher levels of abstraction and reflexivity if need be, the meaningfulness and validity of her or his speech and actions as based upon defensible reasons rather than contingently given or taken for granted meanings, truths, conventions, values, etc. I argue that ontogenesis should be understood, at a formal and structural level, as a process of developing the different forms of competence required for communicative interaction. ;I then reconstruct Charles Taylor's arguments for the importance of ethical ideals and evaluative modes of judgment in the formation of individual identity, and counterpose his hermeneutic conception to the more rationalist model put forward by Habermas. Treating issues of strong evaluation, ethical motivation, constitutive goods, narrative self-understanding, and authenticity, I argue that many of the concerns that Taylor raises should be understood as enrichments to, rather than contextualist criticisms of, Habermas's model of interactive competence. I also argue, however, that Taylor's positions concerning authenticity and the scope of ethical reasoning need to be modified. ;Finally, I turn to a consideration of whether Taylor's theses concerning the diversity of forms of ethical identity available in modern society pose insurmountable challenges to Habermas's diagnosis and evaluation of social pathologies. I argue that, although underdeveloped, the latter has sufficient theoretical resources with which to account for the contextual aspects of the self while maintaining a robust program for normative social critique.