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Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Edited by Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves and Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. 305p. $35.00 cloth, $17.00 paper.
This volume of essays takes its title from Jurgen Habermas's well-known address, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project." Habermas gave the talk in September 1980 upon accepting the Theodor W. Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt, and he brilliantly used the occasion to defend modernity as a project for the future. He was concerned about three types of conservatives: traditionalists who value the cultural integrity of a period prior to modernity; neoconservatives who promote technological progress and capitalist growth; and such contemporary theorists as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, whom he regarded as wishing to break with modernity altogether. According to Habermas, antimodern conservatives like Foucault and Derrida evoke the aesthetic principle of will to power or Being itself to show opposition to instrumental rationality, but they only repeat the mistakes of aesthetic modernity when they undervalue modernity's cultural potential for rationality. As interest grew in JeanFrancois Lyotard's claims about a "postmodern condition," Habermas continued to hold that poststructuralist theories were theoretically inadequate and politically conservative, and he argued that shifting to a communicative understanding of rationality would allow us to view modernity in a positive light. He pursued these themes in several lectures, and in 1985 they formed the core of a book, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, editors of the volume under review, provide the first complete English translation of Habermas's 1980 talk and...