Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Habermas, Jürgen - Timothy Dykstal (review date Fall 1996)

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Timothy Dykstal (review date Fall 1996)

SOURCE: A review of The Past as Future, in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 30, Fall, 1996, pp. 375-79.

[In the review below, Dykstal questions Habermas's standard of "the norm" in The Past as Future.]

Conversation is indispensable to Jürgen Habermas. In the German philosopher's "theory of communicative action," the values that sustain a good conversation—that is, one that produces greater understanding—are perhaps the only transhistorical imperative that we have. We speak in order to be understood, and we can use that desire for understanding to criticize whatever—from material deprivations to immaterial, or ideological, distortions—would defeat it. Given the indispensability of conversation to Habermas, this interview with the German journalist Michael Haller, conducted between the close of 1990 and March 1991, and covering such topics as the Persian Gulf War, German unification,...

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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