Sociology

The social philosophy of Jurgen Habermas, outstanding philosopher and master dialectician of our time, has an immediate appeal to American philosophers, educated in the history of the Protestant migrations to the New World in search of religious freedom; educated also in the Founding Fathers who drew up a constitution for a modern republic heralded by Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence proclaiming the universality of human equality and natural rights; educated as well in the social philosophy of American pragmatism, in which Enlightenment principles of democracy and science become normative social processes.

The appeal of Habermas to American philosophers long acculturated in the Enlightenment tradition is that of a voice speaking for reason and justice; he stands forth philosophically on behalf of "rehabilitating the Enlightenment" in the face of various current modes of thought engaged in its undermining. Habermas has been widely commended for his strong unequivocal stand as a German intellectual against the Nazi movement and the Holocaust it produced, and against any revisionist circumlocutions seeking to obscure those atrocities. Habermas is also commended for his repudiation of Martin Heidegger's complicity with Nazism and his retreat to linguistic mysticism. He is commended as well for his strenuous criticism of postmodernism's drive to bring philosophy to an end. Of crucial philosophical significance is the appreciation of Habermas's recent struggle to "rehabilitate" the Enlightenment by securing it, however unfashionably, upon a firm foundation by a democratic politics of deliberative discussion.

In the face of the multidimensionality of Habermas's perceived accord with American philosophers, as culture carriers and analysts of the Enlightenment tradition, there comes the shocking realization that the Habermas appeal has been misconstrued. The shock occurs with the discovery that Habermas's account of philosophy in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity begins the discussion of philosophy in the modern era with Hegel and finds no place for the tradition of Enlightenment philosophy. How was it possible for Habermas to erase the Enlightenment tradition from his text of the philosophical discussion of the modern era? How, in view of this erasure of Enlightenment thought, was it possible for American philosophers so seriously to misinterpret Habermas's project for "rehabilitating the Enlightenment," with its seemingly Jeffersonian subtext of universal reason and its Deweyan promotion of communicative democracy? How, then, was it possible for Habermas, after omitting the Enlightenment from his overview of modern philosophy, to appeal nevertheless to the Enlightenment language of reason,