ABSTRACT
Jürgen Habermas was born in Dusseldorf in 1929 and was Adorno’s assistant between 1956 and 1959. Habermas’ notion of politics, at its most minimal and anthropological, simply means a non-violent inter-subjectivity in the making, where words-more strictly, sentences or speech acts-rather than rituals or weapons, are the form of social intercourse that counts. In the political dimension of Habermas’ work, there is an appearance of urgency, a sense that the legacy of practical reason-that form of reason pertaining to questions of social norms and ethical practices, and how they are both formed, accounted for and judged-has been inadequately recognised as the fountainhead of modernity. The issue here is double-sided for Habermas; on the one hand he reformulates the monadic basis of subject-centred philosophy, while on the other he simultaneously recasts the transcendental basis of Kant’s philosophy whilst maintaining that Kant’s insight about the differentiation of reason into different domains was essentially correct.
