“Jürgen Habermas may be variously described as the moral conscience of postwar Germany, the last great systematic philosopher, the dominant figure in the second generation of the Frankfurt School and the thinker who brought that ‘school’ to an end”
“Unlike Foucault, Habermas offered the prospect of a ‘reconstructed historical materialism’”
“He conceived postwar capitalist society as a totality, riven with contradictions and crisis tendencies, even as he also rejected economic reductionism”
“Foregrounding ‘communication’ as distinct from ‘labour’, and ‘lifeworld’ as distinct from ‘system’, he posited the relative autonomy of culture, ideas and politics, while also theorising their ‘colonisation’ by bureaucracy”
“The result was a novel critical theory of welfare-state capitalism – the perils it posed and the prospects it opened for emancipation. A synthesis of Marx, Weber and speech-act theory, Habermas’s theory lent systematic heft to New Left intuitions, on the one hand, and to Foucault’s dazzling figurations on the other”
“Structural Transformation taught me to historicise, and problematise, the institutions that appeared to generate the consent of the dominated in capitalist society”
“Legitimation Crisis taught me to identify forms of capitalist crisis beyond the economic – crises of political legitimation, to be sure, but also, by extrapolation, crises of social and ecological reproduction”
“In these works, I found the Habermas I was seeking – the one who was helping to invent an unorthodox democratic Marxism for a new time”
“Having already signed on to Richard Rorty’s radical historicism, I had little sympathy for attempts to establish ‘normative foundations’ for critical theory in the anthropological depths of a putative human disposition to seek agreement via communication”
“I turned elsewhere: to Gramsci on hegemony and counterhegemony; to Althusser on ideology; to feminist theorists on social reproduction; to eco-Marxists on capital’s ‘natures’; to Daniel Bell and Luc Boltanski on its cultures; to Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois on racialised imperialism; to Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi on settler colonialism; to Karl Polanyi on fictitious commodification and social struggle; to David Harvey on neoliberalism; and to Marx on the logic of capital. And yet I felt that Habermas was somehow with me at every step”