Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Habermas, Jürgen - Onora O'Neill (review date 22 November 1990)

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Onora O'Neill (review date 22 November 1990)

SOURCE: "The New Restoration," in London Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 22, November 22, 1990, p. 13.

[In the review below, O'Neill examines various themes of The New Conservatism in terms of Habermas's engagement with contemporary cultural and political debates, concluding that his work proves that "philosophical writing may be engagé without being ephemeral."]

Should philosophers be politically committed, engagés in the manner of Socrates or of Sartre? Or should they adopt an aloof and distanced posture, like Plato after his early political disappointments, who views concern with this-worldly affairs as (at best) a conscientious return from the heights to 'the cave'? Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are surely the two most distinguished political philosophers of our day, and their work exhibits many parallels: but on this deeply political matter they are worlds...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Jürgen Habermas with Boris Frankel (interview date November 1973)
   2. Martin Jay (review date 9 November 1986)
   3. Onora O'Neill (review date 22 November 1990)
   4. Douglas Kellner (review date March 1992)
   5. David Weberman (review date July 1992)
   6. Frederick J. Antczak (review date November 1992)
   7. Peter Dews (review date 13 May 1993)
   8. William Outhwaite (review date May 1994)
   9. Per Fjelstad (review date November 1994)
   10. Dieter Misgeld (review date March 1995)
   11. Richard A. Posner (review date 6 May 1996)
   12. Cass R. Sunstein (review date 18 August 1996)
   13. Timothy Dykstal (review date Fall 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright