![]() ![]() Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." ![]() Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. ![]() The paper ends with a consideration of how and to what extent Habermas's project withstands this postmodernist challenge.Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. This tensionful mix of critical and technocratic-functional elements has been subject to criticism over the years, including the rise of postmodern theory which brings into doubt all modernist metanarratives seeking to conceptualize society in its totality. Although primarily committed to critical theory, Habermas nevertheless borrows from Talcott Parsons' structural functionalist theory for its indispensable conceptualization of systems and normative solidarity. He extends this idea into political participation with the idea of deliberative democracy, whereby only the weight of the better argument prevails. To assure reasoned communication and to preserve the lifeworld against the onslaught of instrumental rationality, Habermas locates the condition of reasoned communication within talk itself (by way of the validity claims). As the state gathers more power and resources to intervene in the lives of citizens (presumably for their benefit), citizens are less able to act on their own behalf to solve problems locally (i.e., the problem of the system colonizing the lifeworld). Jürgen Habermas has spent a long career developing a critical theory of reasoned communication, following Weber's idea concerning the negative aspects of rationalization in western society which places emphasis on technocratic or engineering solutions to problems in society. The critique of structural inequality, the third model of enlightenment, suppresses inequality as incompatible with the universality of enlightenment but proposes a universality that is, like that of a treaty, limited to the history of that inequality itself-and therefore leaves space for other such critiques based upon different structural inequalities. The treaty model exhibits a different particular-universal relationship such that particularity is the necessary soil for universalizing claims and universality is limited to the history of the treaty relationship and is not everywhere viable. Beginning from the well-known Kantian conception in order to illustrate the two-level, particular-universal structure of civil society versus the state that enlightenment requires, a contrast can be drawn with Mendelsohn’s model which can be related to a treaty model of political friendship. Here, I want to distinguish three models of enlightenment-the republican public sphere, treaty federalism, and critique of structural inequality-in order to investigate the relationships between particular and universal that they embody. The title of this paper quotes the question posed by the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784 and answered in that journal by two of the most prominent philosophers of the time: Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelsohn. ![]()
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