Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Habermas, Jürgen - Richard A. Posner (review date 6 May 1996)

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Richard A. Posner (review date 6 May 1996)

SOURCE: "Law's Reason," in The New Republic, Vol. 214, May 6, 1996, pp. 26-30.

[In the following review, Posner details Habermas's central laim in Between Facts and Norms, concluding with two criticisms and two questions.]

Jürgen Habermas, who is professor emeritus of philosophy at Frankfurt University and is widely regarded as Germany's leading philosopher and social thinker, was a month short of his sixteenth birthday when Hitler's Reich collapsed. Shocked to learn of the Nazi atrocities, and free from any complicity in them, Habermas proceeded through the West German university system appalled by its unapologetic continuity with the past. Its philosophy departments, staffed mainly by professors who had served uncomplainingly during the Nazi period, looked up to Heidegger—whom Habermas has sarcastically described as the "felicitously de-Nazified Heidegger"—as the lodestar of German...

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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