"The postnational constellation" by J. Habermas

Résumé du document

Throughout his works J. Habermas has articulated a universalist vision of political life, studying the possibilities of a renewal of democracy in a globalized political environment. With The Postnational Constellation, Habermas focused on the moral and ethical dilemmas of the global postindustrial era, looking for the construction of an inclusive universalist moral framework of mutual understanding...

Extraits

[...] Toward cosmopolitan consciousness Through the model of constitutional patriotism and our increasingly interconnected world, Habermas pledges for the rise of a cosmopolitan consciousness and solidarity. Cosmopolitan solidarity Cosmopolitan solidarity raises numerous questions because it is the ultimate level of abstraction of a collective identity. One can argue that constitutional patriotism has no real existence outside of its philosophical theorisation and lies in an abstraction of the individual. But can people really identify one another according to universal and abstract principles ? Moreover, are these principles effectively universal and not merely centered on European or Western values ? [...]

[...] Habermas advocates a “postnational” Germany where shared identity is attached to nonterritorial values of constitutionalism and democratic rights. He calls for a “society capable of conscious change through the will of its democratically united citizens”[8]. The strength of the democratic state relies on the political participation of its citizens. Constitutional patriotism is essential to understand the shift from the ‘national subject' to the ‘citizen' by separating culture from politics. Habermas looks forward to the break between the principles of republicanism and nationalism in order to promote a “form of abstract, legally constructed solidarity that reproduces itself through political participation”[9], guarantying universal standards of social justice. [...]

[...] His normative critique of national identity has been driven by his role as an engaged intellectual in the German public sphere. As a second generation member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Habermas was a student of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In his wide-ranging works, he had broken with the anti-rationalist, anti-Westernist stance of the previous generation of Frankfurt theorists and taken a different route in his critical appraisal of Western institutions and rationality. Greatly influenced by the Kantian conception of rationality, Habermas believes that through reason we can understand the world and achieve enlightenment. [...]

[...] It is inspired by the catastrophe that caracterise modern German history where the myth of the ‘organic nation' is the product of a historiographical construction. He develops this in the essay on Public Use of History” where he acknowledges that the German “awareness of collective liability emerge[d] from the widespread guilty conduct of individuals in the past”[7]. This artificially constructed identity seems to me very specific to the German national background, and paradoxically anchored in a particular historical context, in so weakening its universal ambition. [...]

[...] With The Postnational Constellation, Habermas concentrated on the moral and ethical dilemmas of the global postindustrial era, looking for the construction of an inclusive universalist moral framework of mutual understanding. The different essays of the book provide a theoretical explanation of the dilemmas and ambiguities of social modernisation. Habermas starts his argumentation by reflecting on the problematique of the and the His observations are based on the analysis of the construction of the German political identity and community through the XIXth century and after the Second World War. [...]