The Ends of Solidarity: Discourse Theory in Ethics and Politics (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)
Max Pensky
Language: English
Pages: 278
ISBN: 0791473643
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An in-depth look at the theory of solidarity of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, serving also as a comprehensive introduction to his work.
Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory demands that human beings see themselves in relations of solidarity that cross national, racial, and religious divides. While his theory has won adherents across a spectrum of contemporary debates, the required vision of solidarity has remained largely unexplored. In The Ends of Solidarity, Max Pensky fills this void by examining Habermas’s theory of solidarity, while also providing a comprehensive introduction to the German philosopher’s work. Pensky explores the impact of Habermasian discourse theory on a range of contemporary debates in politics and ethics, including the prospect of a cosmopolitan democracy across national borders; the solidarity demanded by the integration process in the European Union; the demands that immigration dynamics make on inclusive democratic societies; the divisive or unifying effects of religion in Western democracies; and the current controversies in genetic technology.
“This book is extremely well written and well argued. Pensky creatively weaves together several strands in contemporary social theory, ethics, and politics.” — Seyla Benhabib, author of The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens
“Pensky provides the best available treatment of Habermas’s most recent works on globalization, ethics, and democracy. There is no comparable book on this aspect of Habermas’s work, especially timely given current debates in political philosophy.” — James Bohman, author of Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi
citizens exploring the elective affinities between a German, a classical, and a world culture— can be a vital tool for the formation of nationalism and national belonging. Indeed some of the most important sources of German national consciousness at the end of the eighteenth century consist in the effort to manufacture “Germanness” from out of the political fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire via the cultural vehicle of the “grand tour” of Italian and Greek antiquities.6 Moreover, the elevated
contrary: democratic constitutional nation-states appear just as able to generate high degrees of national identity as at virtually any time in the modern period, in large measure, it would appear, as a reaction against the very forces of globalization that apparently threaten nationalisms. The unambiguous move on the part of former Soviet satellites to reanimate and reappropriate national consciousness only reinforces this point. The argument, in other words, cannot be that double-coded national
political agent. As judicial quietism and congressional and governmental supremacy have transformed immigration law into party politics by other means, the increasingly unstable effects on national solidarity are becoming more and more visible. As Peter Schuck writes, In a constitutional system marked by an extraordinary range of political, institutional, and social fragmentation, manifestations of solidarity and nationhood can exercise a potent hold over the judicial, as well as the lay
toward a kind of communicative evacuation, according to which the imperatives of bureaucratic organization or economic efficiency trump the communicative practices that these steering media may still have maintained as the legacy of their earlier embeddedness in structures of a symbolically structured lifeworld. The relative devaluation of solidarity as a mechanism of social integration means, in functional terms, a legitimation crisis. If we assume Constitutional Solidarity and Constitutional
and a somewhat less messy civil society to the political system. The core insight here is that, unlike some of the classic legal positivists, and quite unlike Luhmann and other systems theorists, Habermas will always insist that a theory of law has to show how law connects formal and informal, institutional and noninstitutional, orderly and anarchic political spheres together. This connection is also the connection between system and lifeworld.7 This claim leads, finally, to the reconstruction of