FROM ECLIPSE OF REASON TO THE AGE OF REASONS? HISTORICIZING HABERMAS AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Abstract

Two new works historicize the human faculty of reason. The first, a biography of Jürgen Habermas, traces the evolution of his postmetaphysical theory of reason from its origins to its most recent iterations. The second offers a far broader genealogy of the concept of reason in modern thought, especially in Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt school. Both depict Habermas as one of the most important protagonists in contemporary philosophy, but offer differing accounts of his place in the history of the “Frankfurt school.” The two also contextualize Habermas very differently. While Müller-Doohm locates Habermas firmly within a postwar German, European, and to a lesser extent transatlantic frame, Jay opts for the longue durée of German Idealist thought and its critics from Kant to the first generation of the Frankfurt school. Both help us assess the merits of the procedural rationality that Habermas considers the only valid conception of reason available to us as moderns—Müller-Doohm by sketching its many facets and spheres of application, Jay by scrutinizing the arguments for and against Habermas's account of reason. As Jay puts it, it is fair to say that a paradigm shift has occurred in our appreciation of the stakes involved in defending reason as a ground of critique against those who have reduced it to a tool in the service of some deeper purpose . . . put in a nutshell, it might be said—or at least plausibly hoped—that both the Enlightenment's Age of Reason and the Counter-Enlightenment's Age of Reason's Other have been left behind, and in their place is dawning a new Age of Reasons” (148, original emphasis).