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A Case of Communicative Learning?: Rereading Habermas’s Philosophical Project through an Arendtian Lens

Jürgen Habermas has sought to set critical theory on firm normative foundations by drawing on thinkers outside the canon of Western Marxism. My basic thesis is that Hannah Arendt is a crucial but underappreciated resource for his intellectual development. To make this point, I focus on Arendt’s importance for Habermas’s work on the public sphere in the 1960s and the social theory he developed in the 1970s and ‘80s, despite his reluctance to cite her writings in his early career. More generally, I argue that rereading Habermas’s critical theory through Arendt’s political thought helps to clarify the importance of politics within his work, thus countering accusations that he is an abstract thinker of “high liberalism” who is uninterested in “real politics.” A greater appreciation of Arendt’s work as a condition of possibility for Habermas’s philosophy demonstrates the importance of reading their work together as part of a common project.