In an age characterized by an abyss between the rejection of truth by skeptical postmodernists and the adoration of truth either by religious fundamentalists or metaphysical philosophers, Jürgen Habermas remains the principal voice for the Enlightenment's pursuit of realizing a critical rationality in the world. David Ingram's work on Habermas insightfully reviews the different stages of Habermas's evolution as a thinker and shows how committed Habermas is to the nexus of philosophy, democratic theory, and law.
After an initial chapter that traces Habermas's intellectual formation from the epistemological debate between Kant and Hume through the Frankfurt School's recasting of the Enlightenment project, Ingram's text essentially has two sections. The first section deals with the evolution of Habermas's discourse theory, which puts into practice a critical rationality that is not dependent on pure reason. Separate chapters deal with his engagement of psychoanalysis, linguistic philosophy, formal pragmatism, and deontological moral theory toward this end. The second section deals with the impact this discursive rationality has on our understanding and practice of democracy and law. Separate chapters deal with foundational rights; the organization of government power; inclusion based on culture, gender, and religion; economic justice; and democracy in a global age. A final chapter illustrates how Habermas turns to an aesthetic rationality to deal with what Ingram terms the discontents of modernity.
In the more theoretical section of his presentation, Ingram shows how Habermas seeks to reinvigorate Enlightenment rationality in the wake of both Nietzsche's critique of reason and what critical theorists have termed the dialectic of Enlightenment. In contrast to postmodernists who contend that Nietzsche's critique of reason stresses the difficulty of human dialogue without one interlocutor's will to power being superimposed on another, Habermas contends that this postmetaphysical discourse provides the opportunity for a critical reason to emerge through discourse that entails not only understanding but emancipation. In turn, in response to Adorno and Horkheimer's contention that the rationality that was supposed to lead to emancipation culminates in bureaucratic conformity, Habermas contends that “the ideal speech situation implicit in discourse” is not actually realized but serves as “a critical standard” for assessing the degree to which our actual discourses fall short of “rational experiences” (103). Whereas the early Habermas engages in this critique more in the emancipatory manner of Marx or Freud, Ingram illustrates how the later Habermas articulates the ideal speech situation in a discursive manner more akin, but not identical, to Rawls.
In the section dealing with democracy and law, Habermas, according to Ingram, puts forth a proceduralist paradigm in contrast to the prevailing liberal and welfare/republican paradigms. Whereas the liberal paradigm focuses on negative rights and limited government regulation, the welfare paradigm focuses on fostering positive rights, countering the economic inequality begotten by capitalism, and forging a thick communal identity. Ingram reviews how Habermas's proceduralist paradigm pursues the realization of autonomy and community well-being through democratic discursive rational practices and in so doing is critical of the sheer individualism of liberalism and conversely the organicism in republicanism. Consequently, as Ingram illustrates in Habermas's concrete engagement of issues such as gender inclusion, immigration, and economic inequality, the focus is on “deliberation, not decision” (258) for legitimizing democracy—a concrete analogue to the ideal speech situation.
In addition to his incisive presentation of Habermas's ideas, Ingram provides cogent constructive criticism in almost every chapter that will incite future debate, especially in critical theory. In the more theoretical section, Ingram illustrates that Habermas keeps encountering the antinomy that when critique becomes too enmeshed in the lifeworld, it loses its capacity for critical distance, whereas when critique is too detached from the lifeworld, it loses the concreteness that Habermas sees as integral to discursive rationality. The corollary in Ingram's more practical applied section is that in real-life situations a meeting may proceed with seemingly fair procedures but not lead to just outcomes, and, conversely, the latter are purely abstract unless realized in the world. Overall, Ingram finds Habermas's discourse ethics too insensitive to the way in which strategic action, power relationships, and the sheer plurality of contexts of meaning impede equal deliberation and thereby jeopardize legitimation. Rather than reject Habermas's analyses, however, Ingram's critiques seek to put into further discourse the questions and issues they raise as opposed to resolve.
Curiously, Ingram does not provide such criticism in the final chapter on aesthetic rationality, where it is clearly warranted. As Ingram points out, Habermas ultimately claims there is a holistic sense of meaning and hope from religion and aesthetic sensibility that is not realized in the arid deliberations of discursive rationality. Habermas draws particularly here on his German intellectual roots—Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Arendt, and of course Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. I find this move quite attractive and Ingram's presentation would have benefited from including more of Habermas's dialogue with Pope Benedict XVI in this regard. Still, it is striking that a thinker whose career has been devoted to critical discourse would opt for this epiphanic resolution. Moreover, in the discussion of church and state earlier in the text, however much reason and religion are in dialogue, reason retains the upper hand. This tension between these different stances needs much more examination.
Through Ingram's overall presentation, one vividly grasps Habermas's passionate commitment to the pursuit of reason. The range of scholarly, legal, and political discourses Habermas has engaged is very impressive; he is clearly open to his critics and often is persuaded by them. Ingram capably discusses these diverse discourses, as well. In turn, Kant's legacy—the notion of critique, the Kingdom of Ends, cosmopolitanism, and aesthetic rationality, among other ideas—clearly permeates Habermas's analysis. Conversely, Habermas seeks to situate these notions in concrete discourse rather than their being realized from the stance of isolated self or detached observer.
As much as Ingram deftly communicates these diverse discourses traversed by Habermas, they remain very much ensconced within the Western tradition. Although it is implicit in Ingram's discussion of Habermas's consideration of multiculturalism, immigration, human rights, and global democracy, this text never makes explicit where Habermas stands vis-à-vis non-Western discourses in the manner of comparative political theory. The type of integration of Western and non-Western ideas that characterizes for instance Sen's The Idea of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2009) simply is not found in Ingram's text. Especially given the growing number of discourses that are characterizing twenty-first-century politics, Ingram needs to discuss—perhaps in a subsequent work—whether Habermas's discursive rationality includes and engages these non-Western contributions in a way that does not privilege the Western heritage. Exploring the basis on which people of diverse cultural heritages can even begin to engage in equal discourse is certainly germane to Habermas's discursive project, yet it remains undeveloped in this text.
Overall, this text is primarily directed at graduate students and professors of philosophy, political theory, social theory, and law. Not unlike Habermas's arguments, Ingram's presentation can be quite dense. Still, contemporary political theorists will find Ingram's constructive criticisms provocative. For those less initiated in Habermas's ideas, this volume integrates the different stages of his work as well as his positions on democratic participation and policy.
