The Anguish of Critique/The Critique of Anguish

Abstract

Jurgen Habermas. (2015). The Lure of Technocracy. Translated by Ciaran Cronin . Polity, Cambridge, 176 pp., $22.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-745-68682-0). Although there have always been political implications of Jurgen Habermas’s more philosophical arguments, since the turn of the century he has offered a more concrete form of commentary when discussing European affairs. This is his third English-language book in the past several years on Europe and/or the European Union. All are imbued with a pessimism that reads as an anguished critique of developments in the past decade—not least the Eurozone crisis and associated public disillusionment with the European integration project. Habermas is far from alone, which means that although the book is a typically thoughtful, coherent, and timely intervention that will be of interest to political theorists, Europeanists of all stripes, and students of contemporary German philosophy (see the third and final part of the book on the relationships between Jews and Germans), it also sits in a broader historical-intellectual context. By situating Habermas in this milieu, we can acknowledge that The Lure of Technocracy ranks alongside recent contributions by Crouch (2013), Gamble (2014), Offe (2014), and Streeck (2014) in despairing at the evolution of capitalist democracies in the twenty-first century. This is significant, because it enables us to identify and interrogate the increasingly crisis-ridden nature of the “critical” social science frameworks, for which these (and other) authors are justifiably lauded, that have dominated many debates since the 1970s. These approaches rejected transformative agendas such as those found in “New Left” politics and Marxist scholarship, … ian.bruff{at}manchester.ac.uk