Review: Habermas and the Transformations of Critical Theory

Habermas and the Transformations of Critical Theory: Faces of Critique #

Edited by Amirhosein Khandizaji and James J. Chriss Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

Khandizaji, Amirhosein, and James J. Chriss, eds. 2025. Habermas and the Transformations of Critical Theory: Faces of Critique. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer Nature Switzerland. ISBN 978-3-031-98025-1 (hardback), 978-3-031-98026-8 (eBook).

Jürgen Habermas has now been publishing for close to seventy years, and Amirhosein Khandizaji and James Chriss organize their editors' introduction around a genuinely useful periodization, borrowed from Kire Sharlamanov, that divides that career into four phases: the early public-sphere and knowledge-interests work of the 1960s, the Starnberg-era groundwork for communicative action in the 1970s, the mature theory of communicative action and discourse ethics of the 1980s and 1990s, and a fourth phase since 2000 turning toward religion, international law, and, most recently, the three-volume Also a History of Philosophy. Against that map, the editors assemble eight substantive chapters from a genuinely distinguished set of contributors, Stefano Petrucciani, Alessandro Ferrara, Darrow Schecter, Simon Susen, Hans-Herbert Kögler, among others, each taking up a different facet of Habermas's system: discourse ethics and religion, the postmetaphysical turn, Marxian emancipation, democratic statehood, the Mead and Husserl lineage, the Rawls debate, and the digital public sphere. The subtitle, "Faces of Critique," promises a volume organized around genuine confrontation with Habermas's positions. What it delivers is more mixed, some chapters critique, several primarily explain, and the difference matters for how the book should be used.

Where the volume earns its subtitle #

The strongest chapter, and the one that most fully honors the book's title, is Michael J. Thompson's "On the Ontological Content of Morality." Thompson, who elsewhere has made a career of prosecuting what he calls the "domestication" of critical theory by its second and third generations, here turns that same charge on Habermas's postmetaphysical proceduralism directly. His argument is precise: Habermas's discourse ethics locates moral validity entirely in the conditions under which consensus is reached, whether participants speak freely, whether claims are subject to open contestation, and this leaves the theory unable to say anything about the substantive, ontological conditions, poverty, racism, structural domination, that shape who actually gets to participate in discourse on equal terms in the first place. Thompson's proposed alternative, a "critical social ontology" that grounds normative validity in freedom-enhancing forms of social life rather than in procedural consensus alone, is argued with real philosophical care, engaging Habermas's technical vocabulary of Geltung and Gültigkeit directly rather than gesturing at it. Readers who have encountered Neal Harris's recent case against Axel Honneth's normative reconstruction, which draws on this same Thompson lineage, will recognize the family resemblance: this is the same charge, that Frankfurt School critical theory's second and third generations have replaced immanent critique of existing norms with an uncritical embrace of the proceduralist conditions under which those norms get ratified, now aimed at Habermas himself rather than his student. Darrow Schecter's chapter is nearly as sharp, and considerably more willing to name names: he argues that communicative action's account of democratic statehood, plausible from the 1980s through 2008, has been outpaced by the fusion of political and social crisis since the financial crash, citing Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency under the second Trump administration as a live instance of exactly the kind of institutional rupture Habermas's framework struggles to theorize.

Where the subtitle overpromises #

Several of the remaining chapters function more as expository reconstruction than critique, useful for readers new to Habermas, less useful for readers wanting to see his positions genuinely tested. Simon Susen's chapter on "the tasks of contemporary philosophy" is a competent survey of communicative action, discourse ethics, and Habermas's engagement with Foucault and Derrida, but its conclusion, that Habermas's framework "remains highly relevant" to an era of polarization and misinformation, restates the case for Habermas's continued importance rather than interrogating it. James Chriss's own chapter tracing Habermas's use of Mead and Husserl is a genuinely illuminating piece of intellectual history, showing how Habermas found Husserl's phenomenology too transcendental and Mead's social behaviorism insufficiently attentive to the origins of norm-consciousness, and had to import Durkheim's sociology of religion to complete the synthesis, but it is history of ideas rather than critique in any evaluative sense. Alessandro Ferrara's chapter, revisiting the Habermas-Rawls dispute over "the reasonable" through the lens of Habermas's recent Also a History of Philosophy, is a republished 2021 journal article rather than newly commissioned material, a fact the acknowledgments disclose but that readers should know going in: roughly one-ninth of the volume's substantive content is not new to 2025.

The introduction's most debatable choice #

The editors' introduction opens with an extended comparison between Habermas and Herbert Spencer, on the grounds that both dedicated multi-decade careers to synthesizing philosophy, science, and social theory into totalizing intellectual systems. It is a genuinely interesting framing device, and the editors use it to set up the four-phase periodization that structures the rest of the introduction usefully. But the comparison is asserted rather than argued for at any length, Spencer's Social Darwinism and his role in legitimating laissez-faire capitalism sit uneasily next to Habermas's discourse ethics and deliberative democracy, and readers may find themselves wanting either a fuller defense of why this particular parallel illuminates Habermas's project or a more conventional framing that doesn't ask them to hold Spencer in mind for the rest of the introduction's fourteen pages.

An edited volume's usual tension, handled better than most #

Edited volumes on major theorists routinely struggle with coherence, and this one is more honest about that struggle than most, largely because the editors' introduction does real synthesizing work rather than simply summarizing each chapter in sequence. The decision to organize contributions around Habermas's own periodization gives the collection a spine that many "critical perspectives on X" volumes lack. Where the volume falls short of its own ambition is in delivering a consistent register across contributions: a reader moving from Thompson's sharp ontological challenge to Susen's appreciative survey to Ferrara's technical Rawls exegesis experiences something closer to a very good conference panel, with real variation in how combative individual speakers chose to be, than a unified argument about what "critique" of Habermas should look like in 2025. That is a reasonable thing for an edited volume to be. It is a slightly different thing than what "Faces of Critique" promises on the cover.

Verdict #

Habermas and the Transformations of Critical Theory is a genuinely useful state-of-the-field survey, anchored by a strong periodizing introduction and carried by two exceptional chapters, Thompson's ontological challenge to postmetaphysical proceduralism and Schecter's argument that communicative action has been overtaken by the post-2008 crisis of democratic statehood, both of which do the confrontational work the subtitle promises. Readers wanting a map of Habermas's sixty-year career, with expert guides to its major turns and its engagements with Mead, Husserl, Rawls, and religion, will find this volume genuinely useful, particularly given how current some of the material is, Schecter's chapter reaches into 2025 political events directly. Readers expecting every chapter to challenge Habermas as forcefully as its title suggests should adjust expectations: this is a volume with real faces of critique in it, alongside a good deal of sympathetic exposition wearing critique's name.