Bakhtin and Habermas: Toward a transcultural ethics

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No matter how widely Mikhail Bakhtin and Jiirgen Habermas might be recognized as key figures of twentieth-century critical theory, they are rarely considered together. ~ The separation of the two is encouraged by disciplinary boundaries - Bakhtin's work is usually considered from within literary criticism or cultural studies, whereas Habermas's audience is located in various branches of philosophy, political science, and sociology. A close comparative reading of each thinker's work is in many ways a formidable if not intimidating task given their voluminous production and vast range of interests. I have chosen to limit the scope of the comparison in order to avoid overwhelming the uninitiated on one side or another while maintaining the interest of those who are familiar with each. Members of both audiences are invited to consider aspects of Bakhtin's and Habermas's work that address one of the most perplexing problems of contemporary social theory - diversity and the dilemma of reconstructing a transcultural (universal) ethics. Although important conceptual shifts occur in the evolution of their respective writings, each corpus maintains a remarkably unified philosophical response to this problem. Neither thinker gives in to pluralism or relativism, yet each, in different ways, recognizes that modern societies develop "polyphonically" and that modern jurisprudence is founded on the attempt to take into consideration the care of unique individuals and their actions in the context of increasingly disparate communal definitions of the "good life. ''a Elements of this complex neo-Kantian theme appear in Habermas's early works on political sociology, critical theory, and philosophy and return in more mature forms across his recent writings on communicative action, discourse ethics, law, and radical democracy. Bakhtin's lifelong preoccupation with the themes of dissimilarity, answerability, and consummation can be discerned from his earliest essays in 1919 to notes on metalinguis