“Defending democracy Why Jürgen Habermas speaks to the social media age” by Mark Hannam (TLS)

The sanest and most Durkheimean from ’em all: chapeau to him for distancing himself from Horkheimer and Adorno.

His next major work, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), was a critique of recent French poststructuralist thought. Habermas argued that the work of Michel Foucault implied that the formation of power and the formation of knowledge are inextricably linked, a position that results ineluctably in the flattening of the complexities of social modernization. His book was, in addition, a considered response to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the most pessimistic text produced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School. In reply to his former teachers Habermas defended modernity as “an unfinished project” that, for all its failings and disappointments, retains significant value as the mechanism for the expansion of human freedom and happiness. ©