The Lure of Technocracy
Jürgen Habermas
Language: English
Pages: 190
ISBN: B00Z0JAF0Q
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Over the past 25 years, Jürgen Habermas has presented what is arguably the most coherent and wide-ranging defence of the project of European unification and of parallel developments towards a politically integrated world society. In developing his key concepts of the transnationalisation of democracy and the constitutionalisation of international law, Habermas offers the main players in the struggles over the fate of the European Union (the politicians, the political parties and the publics of the member states) a way out of the current economic and political crisis, should they choose to follow it.
In the title essay Habermas addresses the challenges and threats posed by the current banking and public debt crisis in the Eurozone for European unification. He is harshly critical of the incrementalist, technocratic policies advocated by the German government in particular, which are being imposed at the expense of the populations of the economically weaker, crisis-stricken countries and are undermining solidarity between the member states. He argues that only if the technocratic approach is replaced by a deeper democratization of the European institutions can the European Union fulfil its promise as a model for how rampant market capitalism can once again be brought under political control at the supranational level.
This volume reflects the impressive scope of Habermas?s recent writings on European themes, including theoretical treatments of the complex legal and political issues at stake, interventions on current affairs, and reflections on the lives and works of major European philosophers and intellectuals. Together the essays provide eloquent testimony to the enduring relevance of the work of one of the most influential and far-sighted public intellectuals in the world today, and are essential reading for all philosophers, legal scholars and social scientists interested in European and global issues.
arisen from nation-states to assume the form of a supranational polity that can act effectively in a democratically legitimate way; on the other hand, they want to embark on this transnationalization of democracy only under the proviso that their nation-states, in their role as future member states, remain guarantors of the already achieved level of justice and freedom. In the supranational polity, the higher political level should not be able to overwhelm the lower one. The issue of ultimate
treaties. Then already the requirement that the right of the national constitutional courts to monitor decisions be upheld would show how the future Political Union deviated from the pattern of a European federal state. The deviation would also concern the required equitable participation of European citizens and the European peoples (in the guise of the member states) in the formation of a government, and also the corresponding twofold responsibility of the Commission, which would have been
developed into a government, towards the European Parliament and the Council, and especially the equal participation of both institutions in all legislation. The existing decentralization of the state monopoly over the legitimate use of force and the implementation of the laws by each individual state – that is, the absence of an independent federal administrative level – would also have to be retained. The idea of a form of sovereignty divided at the root would naturally only provide pointers
from one domain into the other. For, in Martin Buber’s case, the humanist grounding of his Zionism can be understood in terms of the translation of particular religious intuitions in philosophical concepts with which we make generalizations that are independent of religious communities (III). I. The Orientation to the Performative Buber wrote his dissertation on Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme. Aside from his love of Hasidism, which had been a response to the emergence of the Frankist sects
philosophy. Understandably enough, he has no interest in a semantics that, in Richard Rorty’s words, is merely the continuation of seventeenth-century epistemology with language-analytical means. Wittgenstein’s turn to the use of language was more congenial to Buber’s view.26 Buber had the important and correct intuition that, without the dialogically created ‘between’ of an intersubjectively shared background, we cannot achieve objectivity of experience or judgement – and conversely. With his