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The Politics of Pedagogy

Few intellectuals can afford to have a publication series devoted to their own ‘occasional political writings’. Yet Jürgen Habermas has pulled off this feat for a number of decades now. Every three or four years he collects miscellaneous pieces of political-philosophical commentary and makes them into a little book. Some of these occasionalist books have been decidedly mixed bags. Serious essays that prepare a genuine rethinking of Habermasian theories have been interspersed with rather uninformative interviews as well as birthday speeches for his publisher and other luminaries. In a few cases, the publication of the book seemed justified purely by the fame of its author. The Postnational Constellation, the latest instalment of Habermas’s brief political writings to be translated into English, turns out to have a rather higher proportion of original and thought-provoking pieces. Moreover, unlike previous volumes, the collection turns out to be fairly coherent – not least because the book is driven by two genuine philosophicalcum-political problems which ultimately turn out to be interrelated. One problem is how the present is supposed to relate to the past – and, in particular, how present generations are supposed to deal with a history of mass violence and cruelty. The other is the question of how democracy can catch up with economic globalization. Habermas’s two main concerns here are hardly a new departure for him. Especially since his decisive interventions in the famous (or infamous) Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) in the late 1980s, Habermas has been preoccupied with the uses and abuses of history for German democratic life. In this volume, he allies himself with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and his controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Whereas German historians – and in particular left-wing historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Hans Mommsen with whom Habermas usually forms a united front – judged Goldhagen’s book to be fatally flawed, Habermas praises the young American for asking the right questions about individual choices and responsibility during the Nazi era. He draws a rather sharp distinction between historians as professionals and as intellectuals in order to claim that Goldhagen as an intellectual has made an important contribution to the Germans’ ‘ethical-political discourse of collective self-understanding’. At the same time, however, it seems that this discourse is inseparable from the way the living – whether as professionals, intellectuals or ordinary mortals – approach the past in the first