Special issue: Habermas

This week, K. Review is published on a Sunday with an article by Jürgen Habermas. With relentless lucidity, the philosopher of the European idea analyzes the weakening of the West and the narrow margins that still remain open to European action.

Jürgen Habermas is undoubtedly the greatest thinker on the reconstruction of Europe, the clarification of its normative foundations established after 1945, and its definition as a supranational entity that has made the defense of individual and minority rights, as well as international justice, its unwavering imperative. In particular, his relentless criticism of nationalism is fueled by a vivid memory of the abyss that was the Shoah. Are we at the end of this historical cycle? Habermas’ masterful analysis here focuses on Europe in light of the new global situation, of which the war in Ukraine is both a revelation and a current testing ground. Ending this war is the urgent task of the moment. However, the fundamental question remains. How, in a situation of global weakening of the West, the liquidation of democracy in the American sphere, and persistent national resistance in European countries, starting with Germany, to moving towards political integration, can we imagine the future? This future hangs in the balance, with a weakened Europe, undermined by left-wing and right-wing populism, tied against its will to American power at a time when the latter is turning its back on its founding principles. While pessimism may be rife, we cannot afford to give up. For what is becoming increasingly unlikely is nonetheless vital to our individual and collective ways of life, insofar as they are based on a normative constitution of Europe that deserves to be maintained.

It is not possible to separate the crisis experienced by the Jews from that experienced by Europe—and the latter has just taken a decisive turn. In this text, delivered on November 19 in Munich, Jürgen Habermas makes an unequivocal observation: the America that embodied a certain idea of the West no longer exists. What is happening there—the purge of the executive branch, the neutralization of the law, the silence of a civil society that reserves its indignation for other causes—is a regime change legitimized by the ballot box. For Europe, caught in an alliance that has lost its normative coherence, it is time to take stock, however bitter it may be, without losing hope.

A major figure in global intellectual debate, Jürgen Habermas is the author of a monumental body of philosophical work that can be read as the theoretical basis of the European political ideal since the Second World War. The consciousness of German crime and the Jewish contribution to European philosophy over its long history occupy a fundamental place in his thinking. This is what recalls this essay by philosopher Bruno Karsenti, conceived as a tribute. It is also a tribute to what the European spirit, as extended by Habermas, can still bring to today’s Jews.

Faced with the verbal inflation that has been mounting in civil society, politics and the social sciences since October 7, Jürgen Habermas and three eminent colleagues from Frankfurt University – Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst and Klaus Günther – set out to clarify what solidarity with Israel, but also with the Palestinian people, really means. This is a short, hard-hitting text, written in the best tradition of critical theory which, to paraphrase one of its founders, Th. W. Adorno, assumes that when you find yourself in a world that plays with words, you have to put your cards on the table.

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Thanks to the Paris office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their cooperation in the design of the magazine’s website.