Constitutional state and democracy: On Jürgen Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms

In his Between Facts and Norms, [1] Jürgen Habermas offers a justification of the ʻdemocratic constitutional stateʼ from the viewpoint of his communicative or discourse theory, and gives a thorough exposition of his conception of democratic politics. In what follows I will attempt to give a general outline of Habermasʼs political philosophy and to suggest […]

Thinking politically with Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Pontyʼs fertile and provocative approach to philosophy was abruptly terminated by his death in 1961. Paul Ricoeurʼs judgement that he was the greatest of the French phenomenologists1 has frequently been cited since then, yet a second demise occurred during the 1960s: this time at the hands of phenomenologyʼs structuralist and poststructuralist critics. Although their targets […]