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
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.
Mutual understanding is inherent in human language as its telos.
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.
Related Quotes
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
-- Francisco Goya
Have the courage to use your own understanding!
-- Immanuel Kant
Power without the people's trust is nothing.
-- Catherine II of Russia
Slavery is the daughter of darkness; an ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction.
-- Simón Bolívar
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
-- Sigmund Freud
Modern man has been freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him. He has not yet gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self.
-- Erich Fromm