Modernity — an unfinished project.
Die Moderne — ein unvollendetes Projekt.
Philosophers
Jürgen Habermas
Born in 1929 in Germany, Juergen Habermas is a philosopher and social theorist representing the second generation of the Frankfurt School. In The Theory of Communicative Action he proposed a dialogical rationality as an alternative to instrumental reason, and in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere he traced the rise and decline of the bourgeois public sphere. He laid the theoretical foundations of discourse ethics and deliberative democracy, defending the Enlightenment as an 'unfinished project.'
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Jürgen Habermas's Other Quotes
Mutual understanding is inherent in human language as its telos.
Only those rules and communicative presuppositions that enable universalization in the sense of reciprocal consideration of all parties' interests can claim consent.
The public sphere is a social phenomenon just as elementary as action, the actor, the group, or the collective; but it eludes the conventional sociological concepts.
In a secular state, citizens of faith as well as citizens without faith may mutually expect that in the political public sphere each side will learn to take the perspective of the other.