ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author provides a brief sketch of Jurgen Habermas' contributions to the intercultural dialogue on human rights. Habermas has long stressed the crucial role of intercultural dialogue on human rights in decentring Eurocentrism. The primary affirmative tool that Habermas relies on is rational reconstruction, bringing it to bear in the intercultural dialogue on human rights, first, at the more abstract level of discourse theory and, second, with his rational reconstruction of the system of rights at the heart of constitutional democracies. The author focuses on two objections to Habermas. The first is that developmentalist assumptions about Western progress that are central to his theory of modernity pose an insuperable obstacle to open and inclusive dialogue. The second objection is that his genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking is exclusionary in focusing solely on a Western audience, and that this deficit in the genealogy cannot be made up for with intercultural dialogue alone.
