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‘Habermas has been an unflagging defender of both the Enlightenment,
as a pivot in European history, and enlightenment, as an ongoing pro-
cess that transcends towards universality from within local contexts.
He has therefore been accused of Eurocentrism and of using universal-
ism to mask the West’s colonial and imperial ambitions. This second
edition of this pioneering anthology challenges these misunderstand-
ings of Habermas’ work, and the new contributions engage with his
majestic Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie. The book will be indis-
pensable for exploring Habermas’ own challenge to think through and
beyond the (de)provincializing of Western political thought.’
Eduardo Mendieta, Professor of Philosophy, Penn
State University
‘This illuminating collection of essays represents an overdue attempt
to “deprovincialize” Habermas and his contributions to critical theory.
We learn not only how and why Habermas is relevant to the “postna-
tional constellation”, but also why his ideas remain useful for under-
standing the conditions of deep global pluralism. And there is even
some icing on the cake: this second, updated edition includes con-
tributions on Habermas’ most recent philosophical writings. Highly
recommended for both advanced students and those already versed in
contemporary political and social theory.’
William E. Scheuerman, James H. Rudy Professor of
Political Science, Indiana University
‘This excellent collection marks a milestone in Habermas studies. It
engages with Habermas’ political theory from global perspectives that
extend from post-colonialism and global constitutionalism to demo-
cratic experiments in China and women’s movements in India. At
once knowledgeable, charitable and critical of Habermas, it will be
essential reading for students and scholars alike. The second edition
has been updated with two superb new essays on Auch eine Geschichte
der Philosophie.’
James Gordon Finlayson, Professor of
Social and Political Philosophy and Director
of the Centre for Social and Political
Thought, University of Sussex


Deprovincializing Habermas
T his book provides a rich and systematic engagement with Jürgen
Habermas’ political theory from critical perspectives outside its
Western locus. It constructively examines the theory’s implications
for non-‘Western’ contexts ranging from Latin America and the
Middle East to India and China, and for themes ranging from
cosmopolitanism, democracy and human rights to colonialism,
feminism, care, modernity, and religion. The chapters added to the
second edition explore Habermas’ own recent response to the charge
of ‘provincialism’.
The book will be of special interest to scholars and students of
political theory, global justice, international affairs, philosophy, and
critical theory, and also to those working in postcolonial studies,
religious studies, sociology and cultural studies.

Tom Bailey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Cabot University

in Rome, Italy. His research focuses on contemporary political philoso-
phy, ethics and the history of modern philosophy. He has published
various articles in these areas, and edited Contestatory Cosmopolitanism
(2016/2017) and co-edited Rawls and Religion (2014).
Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political Thought
Series Editors: Aakash Singh Rathore and Sebastiano Maffettone, Center for
Ethics & Global Politics, Luiss University, Rome

Whereas the interrelation of ethics and political thought has been recognized
since the dawn of political reflection, over the last sixty years – roughly
since the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – we have
witnessed a particularly turbulent process of globalizing the coverage and
application of that interrelation. At the very instant the decolonized globe
consolidated the universality of the sovereign nation-state, that sovereignty
– and the political thought that grounded it – was eroded and outstripped,
not as in eras past, by imperial conquest and instruments of war, but rather
by instruments of peace (charters, declarations, treaties, conventions), and
instruments of commerce and communication (multinational enterprises,
international media, global aviation and transport, internet technologies).
Has political theory kept apace with global political realities? Can ethical
reflection illuminate the murky challenges of real global politics?
This Routledge book series Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political
Thought addresses these crucial questions by bringing together outstanding
monographs and anthologies that deal with the intersection of normative
theorizing and political realities with a global focus. Treating diverse topics
by means of interdisciplinary techniques – including philosophy, political
theory, international relations and human rights theories, and global and
postcolonial studies – the books in the Series present up-to-date research
that is accessible, practical, yet scholarly.
Politics and Cosmopolitanism in Global Age
Edited by Sonika Gupta and Sudarsan Padmanabhan
Human Rights in Postcolonial India
Edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi and V.G. Julie Rajan
Religion and Civil Society in the Arab World
In the Vortex of Globalization and Tradition
Edited by Tania Haddad and Elie Al Hindy
Formatting Religion
Across Politics, Education, Media, and Law
Edited by Marius Timmann Mjaaland
International Toleration
A Theory
Pietro Maffettone
What is Pluralism?
Edited by Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore
Deprovincializing Habermas
Global Perspectives
Second edition
Edited by Tom Bailey

For more information about this series, please visit: www​.routledge​.com​/

Ethics​-Human​-Rights​-and​- Global​-Political​-Thought​/ book​- series​/ EHRGPT
Deprovincializing Habermas
Global Perspectives

Second Edition
Edited by Tom Bailey
Second edition published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
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© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Tom Bailey; individual chapters,

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

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explanation without intent to infringe.

First edition published by Routledge 2013

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ISBN: 978-0-367-35080-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-25030-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-32958-6 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586

Typeset in Berling
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents

Notes on Contributors ix
Foreword by Maeve Cooke xii
Editor’s Preface to the Second Edition xv

Introduction 1
Tom Bailey

Part I Democratizing

1 Back to Kant?: The Democratic Deficits in Habermas’

Global Constitutionalism 25
Lars Rensmann

2 Democratizing International Law: A Republican

Reading of Habermas’ Cosmopolitan Project 47
James Bohman

3 Feminist Solidarity in India: Communitarian

Challenges and Postnational Prospects 66
Kanchana Mahadevan

4 Deliberation Without Democracy?: Reflections on

Habermas, Mini-publics and China 90
William Smith

Part II Decolonizing

5 Defending Habermas against Eurocentrism: Latin

America and Mignolo’s Decolonial Challenge 111
Raymond Morrow


viii f Contents

6 Care, Power and Deconstructive Postcolonialism:

Reformulating the Habermasian Response 130
Richard Ganis

7 From Communicative Modernity to Modernities in

Tension 148
John Rundell

Part III Desecularizing

8 What is Living and What is Dead in Habermas’

Secularization Hypothesis? 173
Kevin W. Gray

9 Reason and Li Xing: A Chinese Solution to Habermas’

Problem of Moral Motivation 189
Tong Shijun

10 Radicalizing the Postsecular Thesis, Provincializing

Habermas 206
Péter Losonczi

Part IV Deprovincializing

11 Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its Provincial Roots? 229

Simone Chambers

12 Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue 249

Jeffrey Flynn

Index 271
Notes on Contributors

James Bohman was Danforth Professor of Philosophy and Professor

of International Studies at Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA. His
books include Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (2007),
Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity and Democracy (1996) and
New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy (1991).

Simone Chambers is Professor of Political Science at University of

California Irvine, USA. Her research focuses on issues in delibera-
tive democracy, constitutional politics, the public sphere, secularism
and the work of Jürgen Habermas. She is the author of Reasonable
Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (1996) and
The State of Contemporary Democratic Theory (forthcoming).

Maeve Cooke is Full Professor of Philosophy at University College

Dublin, Ireland, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her books
include Re-Presenting the Good Society (2006) and Language and Reason:
A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (1994). She is also the editor and
translator of Habermas’ On the Pragmatics of Communication (1998) and
has published numerous articles on social and political philosophy in
scholarly journals and edited volumes.

Jeffrey Flynn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham

University, USA. His research focuses on Jürgen Habermas’ social
and political theory and on humanitarianism and human rights. He is
the author of Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A
Philosophical Approach (2014), and of articles in various journals and
book collections.

Richard Ganis is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the City University

of New York and Kean University, USA. He is the author of Politics
from A to Z (2015), The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida:
Between Measurability and Immeasurability (2011) and articles in
Radical Philosophy Review, Comparative and Continental Philosophy
and Critical Horizons, among other journals.


x f Notes on Contributors

Kevin W. Gray is an LL.M. student at Columbia University and an

adjunct assistant professor at New York University and Fordham
University, USA. He was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at
the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. He has pub-
lished articles on political theory, critical theory and international law in
journals including Ancilla Iuris, Critical Horizons, Philosophia, Philosophy
of the Social Sciences and Dialogue. He is the co-editor and international
law area editor of the Springer Global Encyclopedia of Territorial Rights.

Péter Losonczi was Associate Researcher at the Centre for Metaphysics

and Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, K.U. Leuven,
Belgium. His areas of interest were in early modern philosophy, philos-
ophy of religion, politics and religion, and postsecularism. Besides pub-
lishing various articles in these areas, he co-edited Secularism, Religion
and Politics: India and Europe (2015), The Future of Political Theology
(2012), Discoursing the Post-secular (2010) and From Political Theory to
Political Theology (2010).

Kanchana Mahadevan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Mumbai, India. Her interests include debates in continental European
philosophy, political philosophy and feminist philosophy. She is the
author of Between Femininity and Feminism: Colonial and Postcolonial
Perspectives on Care (2014) and a co-editor of The COVID Spectrum
(2022).

Raymond Morrow is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University

of Alberta, Canada. Besides numerous articles and chapters, most
recently “Habermas and Civic Education” in the Handbook of Civic
Engagement and Education (forthcoming), he authored Critical Theory
and Methodology (1994), and co-authored (with Carlos Alberto Torres)
Reading Freire and Habermas (2002) and Social Theory and Education
(1995).

Lars Rensmann is Professor of European Politics and Society at the

University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has authored numer-
ous articles and chapters on international political thought, global
politics and critical theory. His books include The Politics of Unreason:
The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (2017),
Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (co-edited
with Samir Gandesha, 2012) and Gaming the World: How Sports are
 Notes on Contributors F xi

Reshaping Global Politics and Culture (co-authored with Andrei S.

Markovits, 2010).

John Rundell is Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at La Trobe University

and Principal Honorary in the School of Culture and Communication
at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was previously the
Director of the Ashworth Program for Social Theory at the University
of Melbourne. He is the author of Kant: Anthropology, Imagination,
Freedom (2020), Imaginaries of Modernity (2016) and Origins of
Modernity (1987), and the co-editor of numerous collections, including
Critical Theories and the Budapest School (2018), Critical Theory After
Habermas (with Dieter Freundlieb and Wayne Hudson, 2004), Blurred
Boundaries (with Rainer Bauboeck, 1998) and Rethinking Imagination
(with Gillian Robinson, 1994).

Tong Shijun is Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, China. He was previ-

ously Professor of Philosophy at the East China Normal University. He
has published numerous books and over a hundred articles in politi-
cal philosophy, social theory and epistemology. He is also the Chinese
translator of Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms.

William Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of Government

and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
His research focuses on contemporary political theory, and particu-
larly on issues of deliberative democracy, civil disobedience and inter-
national political thought. He is the author of Civil Disobedience and
Deliberative Democracy (2013), and of articles and chapters in various
journals and anthologies.
Foreword
Maeve Cooke

E ven granting the extraordinary range of his writings, from epis-

temology through linguistics to political theory, any new book on
Jürgen Habermas is faced with a daunting challenge. For, in adding to
the extensive literature that already exists on his work, it must show
how it makes a distinctive contribution to understanding his the-
ory and/or developing it productively. Deprovincializing Habermas:
Global Perspectives successfully meets this challenge. It tackles head-
on a question that for some time has been a source of unease for many
of us who have been influenced by Habermas’ thinking and endorse
key elements of his theoretical project. Does his theory’s normative
power extend across cultures and historical epochs, as Habermas
maintains, or does it lack purchase beyond the socio-cultural context
of post-Enlightenment, ‘Western’ modernity? In short, is Habermas’
theory ‘provincial’, and blind to its own provinciality?
The worry about provinciality ultimately concerns the universal-
ity of Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality. This concept
is the core normative intuition that underlies his project, providing
the basis for his vision of a social realm in which cultural traditions
would be reproduced through processes of intersubjective evaluation
of validity claims, legitimate orders would be dependent on open-
ended, inclusive and fair argumentative practices and individual iden-
tities would be self-regulated through processes of critical reflection.
Communicative rationalization would be balanced with the other
mode of rationality that Habermas deems necessary for the function-
ing of complex modern societies, namely, the functionalist rationality
of the economic and administrative systems.
The question of universality is as old as the Frankfurt School tradi-
tion of critical theory itself. From the beginning, Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adorno and other theorists in this tradition endeavoured to
develop a mode of critique that was at once immanent, in the sense of
being anchored in experiences within existing socio-cultural reality,
and context-transcending, in the sense of going beyond the evalu-
ative frameworks of actual socio-cultural contexts and potentially


 Foreword F xiii

extending to all human beings. As they saw it, their task was to
provide an empirically based, critical diagnosis of modern capital-
ist societies that would be emancipatory for humankind in general.
Habermas’ project pursues this same endeavour. His critical social
theory starts from the analysis of existing social and political institu-
tions and the motivations and actions of real human agents; however,
he holds that the validity of its analyses transcends the horizons of
value specific to the social-cultural context in which these institu-
tions and agents are situated. In other words, he derives the normative
power of his theory’s analyses from the concept of communicative
rationality, which he claims is not specific to any particular, ‘provin-
cial’ context, but universal in scope. Maintaining the universality of
communicative rationality, and hence of his critical perspective on
society, is important not merely for reasons of tradition: lacking such
universality, his theory would be unable to allow for intercultural
learning, historical learning and — a theme of his most recent work
— learning from religion. Thus, a great deal turns on the question
of whether the concept of communicative rationality lives up to its
claim to be valid universally and, if not, what modifications would be
necessary in order for it to do so and what implications these would
have for his critical perspective on society.
Communicative rationality is the rational potential for emancipa-
tion that can be extracted from what Habermas calls ‘communicative
action’. In its simplest terms, communicative action is a form of lin-
guistic interaction that involves raising validity claims and respond-
ing to them. It establishes a relationship between speaker and hearer
that is based on a number of normative obligations: the speaker takes
on an obligation to support her claim with reasons, if challenged,
while the hearer takes on a similar obligation to provide reasons for
his ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. This implies that communicative action is
conceptually tied to more or less rudimentary practices of argumen-
tation. Habermas’ claim is that even the most rudimentary forms of
validity-oriented discussion point towards idealized forms of argu-
mentation. He demonstrates this by way of an analysis of the norma-
tive presuppositions of everyday communicative action, arguing that
participants in action of this kind unavoidably commit themselves to
‘strong idealizations’, including the presuppositions that no relevant
argument is suppressed or excluded by participants in the communi-
cative exchange; that participants are truthful, mutually accountable
and motivated only by concern for the better argument; that no force
except that of the better argument is exerted; that no one who could
xiv f Foreword

make a relevant contribution may be prevented from doing so; and

that a justified validity claim would secure the agreement of an ide-
ally expanded audience.
How might the universality of this concept of communicative
rationality be contested or validated? The early theorists of the
Frankfurt School practised a mode of critical social inquiry that drew
on multiple forms of investigation, in the belief that no single disci-
pline has a monopoly on truth or validity and that justification rather
involves a complex web of mutually reinforcing empirical research,
theoretical observations and philosophical reflections. Habermas,
too, pursues this approach. Initially, he looked for support from
his analysis of everyday language use. There is some doubt about
whether the analysis provides sufficient support for the strong claims
that he makes on behalf of the concept of communicative rational-
ity. However, these claims do not stand or fall with its success. It
is entirely in the spirit of his project to test them and the putative
universality of the concept of communicative rationality by drawing
on research and scholarship in other fields and in other contexts. This
is what the contributions to Deprovincializing Habermas do. Dealing
with topics as diverse as international law, the feminist movement in
India, mini-publics in China, and secularization processes, they make
strong arguments for productive modifications and reformulations of
Habermas’ theory. In doing so, they testify not only to the relevance
of the concept of communicative rationality in a global context, but
also to the need for its continuous re-articulation and renewal in an
ongoing process of contestation and validation.
Editor’s Preface to the
Second Edition
Tom Bailey

S ince the first edition of this volume was published, Habermas

himself has provided a systematic response to the charge of ‘pro-
vincialism’. His Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019) pre-
sents a sophisticated genealogy of the emergence of universally valid
standards of rationality and democracy from peculiarly ‘Western’,
Judeo-Christian and scientific origins. In particular, he argues that
philosophy and democratic societies have ‘learnt’ notions of universal-
ity through Western religions, law and science, notions of normative
autonomy through Kant and notions of hermeneutical immanence
and transcendence through Western pragmatism. In light of this, he
holds that the standards of rationality and democracy articulated by
his political theory are valid contributions to global dialogue about
international problems and justice.
Yet initial responses to Habermas’ book have pointed to persist-
ing strains. In particular, critics have emphasized strains between the
universal validity he claims for his standards of rationality and democ-
racy and the contingent identifications and motivations to which he
also appeals, between the ambitious claims he makes for democracy
and dialogue and his appreciation of global cultural differences and
the risks of Western imperialism, and between his recognition of reli-
gions’ roles in ‘learning’ and solidarity and his restriction of religions’
role in democratic dialogue and decision-making. Indeed, some read-
ers have found these strains to be reflected and exacerbated by the
‘provincial’ nature of Habermas’ genealogy itself. It appears, then,
that the paradoxes and tensions exposed by the global extension and
reception of Habermas’ political theory, and explored by the chapters
in this volume, persist even in his own attempt to respond to them.
The two new chapters included in this second edition explore these
‘deprovincializing’ strains in Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie.
Unlike the book’s initial critics, however, both authors argue that
Habermas employs or provides sophisticated resources for under-
standing and addressing these strains. At the same time, they suggest


xvi f Editor’s Preface to the Second Edition

that these important resources need further clarification or develop-

ment, and may not be sufficient to dissolve the strains entirely.
Simone Chambers’ ‘Can Postmetaphysical Reason Escape its
Provincial Roots?’ examines Habermas’ attempt to defend his theory’s
universal validity, despite its ‘Western’ origins. She begins by consid-
ering three important elements. First, she considers how Habermas
thinks that cultures’ shared origins in the emergence of transcend-
ent universality during the ‘Axial Age’ make global intercultural
dialogue possible, and, indeed, also necessary for the ‘West’s’ own
philosophical self-understanding. Second, she considers the impor-
tance of Habermas’ conception of social learning processes, which
both denies any necessity or ‘progress’ in learning and allows that
universal claims can develop from particular origins. Third, she con-
siders the related development of procedural senses of justification,
as Habermas sees these embodied in ‘Western’ scientific enquiry and
democratic constitutionalism. In light of these elements, Chambers
then turns to Habermas’ claim that his theory’s extension beyond its
‘Western’ origins could be vindicated in a global intercultural dia-
logue. Here she emphasizes his sense that, however different, cul-
tures share conditions of technological, bureaucratic and economic
modernity and associated social coordination problems at the supra-
state level. She also argues that Habermas’ insistence on the secular
nature of the dialogue need not exclude all religious contributions
or require the ‘postmetaphysical’ kind of reasoning which he sees
embodied in the ‘West’. Chambers concludes that a global intercul-
tural dialogue could indeed accept the global extension of some of
the ‘Western’ solutions to social problems that Habermas articulates,
and particularly the ‘bootstrapping’ processes of democratic consti-
tutionalism that he describes.
In ‘Decentring Eurocentrism Through Dialogue’, Jeffrey Flynn
argues that Habermas’ attempt to ‘deprovincialize’ his theory through
intercultural dialogue can be better understood and defended by dis-
tinguishing between the different possible objects and participants
of such dialogue. Flynn first considers the objection that Habermas
conceives of intercultural dialogue over human rights in ways that
privilege ‘Western’ perspectives. Here Flynn argues that Habermas’
discourse theory explains the modesty with which any culture must
approach intercultural dialogue, and that Habermas’ ‘Western’
account of constitutional rights is proposed to non-‘Western’ socie-
ties only insofar as they face corresponding challenges of pluralism.
Second, Flynn considers the objection that by conceiving of moder-
nity as the product of progressive learning processes, Habermas
 Editor’s Preface to the Second Edition F xvii

assumes the superiority of ‘Western’ modernity. Here too Flynn

argues that theoretical dialogues should be distinguished from non-
theoretical ones. For Flynn, Habermas may be as open and inclusive
towards other theorists – postcolonial and decolonial critics, say – in
dialogue over his theory of modernity as he may be towards nontheo-
rists in non-‘Western’ contexts in dialogue over human rights, for
example, and he need not impose the theoretical commitments he
would defend in the former dialogue on nontheoretical dialogues of
the latter kind. Finally, Flynn considers the objection that Habermas’
genealogy of postmetaphysical reasoning excludes non-‘Western’ con-
tributions. Again, Flynn claims, Habermas’ claims are better under-
stood as directed to different objects and audiences: his genealogy of
philosophy is directed to practitioners and scholars of ‘Western’ phi-
losophy, and his proposal of postmetaphysical reasoning as suitable
for global intercultural dialogue is directed to nonphilosophers of all
cultures. Flynn insists that these dual functions are not essentially
‘provincial’, although he admits that Habermas’ genealogy should be
expanded to include marginalized philosophical voices.
This edition of Deprovincializing Habermas is dedicated to the
memory of James Bohman and Péter Losonczi.
Introduction
Tom Bailey

Seen from global perspectives, Jürgen Habermas’ political theory

can appear both rich and parochial, critical and partial. On the one
hand, he is perhaps the only major contemporary political theorist
to have formulated, and progressively reformulated, a systematic
normative response to global political challenges. One thinks, for
instance, of his conceptions of democratic politics and cosmopolitan
law, his understanding of the variable forms of modernization and
his accounts of the potential for ‘mutual learning’ among conflicting
perspectives, most notably between secular and religious ones. On
the other hand, however, his theory’s origins and locus in the social,
political and philosophical contexts of the European Enlightenment
render its extension to other parts and aspects of global society pro-
foundly problematic. Indeed, when seen from broader, non-‘Western’
perspectives, his attempts to apply or reformulate his theory in
response to global challenges can appear ‘provincial’ in their con-
tinued reliance on ‘Western’ senses of democratic institutions and
debate, the rational ‘autonomy’ that they promote and the moral and
motivational resources that they presuppose. For other parts of the
globe, and global society itself, would seem to develop divergently
from the West — in their increasing economic and communicative
interdependencies, say, or in their ambivalent attitudes to democracy
and their flourishing religious, ethnic and nationalist cultures.
This book is an attempt to engage critically and constructively
with this troubling paradox in the global extension and reception of
Habermas’ political theory. Rather than being mere critics or disci-
ples, then, the contributors undertake to work both with and beyond
Habermas, to identify the precise failings of his project whilst elabo-
rating his and others’ theoretical resources into novel ‘Habermasian’
responses to problems in contemporary global politics. In particu-
lar, by freeing the more generalizable elements of Habermas’ theory
from its ‘Western’ peculiarities and exploring their extension to
non-‘Western’ contexts, they attempt to ‘deprovincialize’ his the-
ory. This introduction contextualizes these contributions by briefly
setting out the basic elements of Habermas’ theory and then relating

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-1
2 f Tom Bailey

the contributions to three broad themes in global politics with which

both they and Habermas engage, namely, democracy, decolonization
and religion.

Habermas’ Political Project

For Habermas, modernity challenges us to articulate norms for the
coordination of our actions that go beyond both the instrumental and
ideological norms of the modern and the purely conventional norms
of the pre-modern. His response to this challenge is an account of
how, in acting socially, we commit to justify our actions to others,
and thus to pursue a consensus about our actions that satisfies broad
standards of rationality. These standards of ‘communicative rational-
ity’ include not only general rules of argumentation and shared cul-
tural knowledge, meanings and reasons, but also ideal principles of
consensus over true knowledge, right action and sincere expression,
to which appeal can be made when implicit consensus is challenged.
In particular, Habermas argues for a ‘discourse ethics’ according
to which our commitments to right action are subject to a strong
universalizability principle of morality, requiring that their general
observance be acceptable to all affected on the same grounds. He
also emphasizes more particular, ‘ethical’ commitments about good
ends and good lives as contributing to consensus within the particular
cultural groups for which they are meaningful.
However, Habermas also considers the requirements of univer-
sal morality too demanding and those of particular ethics too plural
to ensure social coordination, and hence places more emphasis on
political coordination. In this regard, he argues that coercive laws —
the laws and other policies of representative state institutions — are
subject to a weaker universalizability principle of democratic legiti-
macy, requiring that they be acceptable to all affected citizens on
moral, ethical, pragmatic, or instrumental grounds and in delibera-
tive forums that are dispersed across society. He consequently places
special emphasis on the role of a non-institutional ‘public sphere’ in
enabling citizens to contribute to institutional decision-making.
It is on the basis of this theory of our justificatory commitments
that Habermas articulates his critical approaches to contemporary
politics. For, if correct, the theory shows that the pursuit of rational
acceptability for social norms need not be rejected as a mere ideo-
logical cover for instrumental reasoning or in the name of the extra-
rational ends of the pre-, anti- or post-modern. Rather, it offers
genuine solutions to the problem of coordinating our actions in
 Introduction F 3

modernity, either in terms of a moral or ethical consensus or, insofar

as this is unachievable, in terms of a legal framework the acceptability
of which is established through democratic procedures. Habermas
therefore criticizes the functional rationality of modern markets and
state administration as a threat to rational consensus and acceptabil-
ity and as alone insufficient to achieve social coordination, insofar as it
coordinates action through money or power rather than through jus-
tificatory commitments. In his terms, the ‘systems’ of modern society
threaten to ‘colonize’ the ‘lifeworlds’ of communicative rationality.
Against this threat, he upholds the modern project of rational auton-
omy, appealing to his theory to show how justification can develop
from the conventional to the rational whilst nonetheless avoiding
overarching and ideal, or ‘metaphysical’, conceptions of rationality.
In this regard, he is particularly critical of non- or anti-democratic
tendencies, insisting that democratic institutions and deliberations
allow citizens to realize both a public and a private ‘self-legislation’.
While pursuing this critical project, however, Habermas has also
elaborated and reformulated his theory in response to a variety of
philosophical, political and social challenges, many of which con-
cern its extension beyond the ‘Western’ contexts in and for which it
was first developed. In particular, he has attempted to explain how
democracy might operate in non-‘Western’ states and at a global
level, to determine the implications and possibilities of his account
of rational social coordination in non-‘Western’ normative contexts
such as those marked by colonization and decolonization and to pro-
vide a response to the persistent influence of religions in modern
societies. That is, he has undertaken to democratize, decolonize and
desecularize his theory for global contexts. The contributions to this
book engage with these three ‘global’ reconfigurations. In each case,
they tend to consider Habermas’ attempts to be laudable and yet ulti-
mately inadequate to the global problems that they address, and they
therefore propose alternative ‘Habermasian’ solutions to the relevant
tensions between his theory and its new global contexts. The rest of
this introduction, like the book itself, is divided among these three
reconfigurations.

Democratizing
The first global challenge with which Habermas engages is that of
democracy and democratization, at both the state and the interna-
tional levels. His engagement develops in the light of his account of
democracy at the state level, which he treats as the institutionalization
4 f Tom Bailey

in laws of attempts to rationally coordinate social actions on moral,

ethical, pragmatic, and fairly bargained grounds. Crucially, he insists
that — at least through the procedures followed, if not by direct
participation — democratic law-making allows citizens to achieve a
political sense of autonomy, insofar as making laws that are ration-
ally acceptable to all affected allows them to enjoy and determine
the ‘private’ autonomy of liberal freedoms as well as the ‘public’
autonomy of deliberating over the laws that govern them. He thus
envisions a liberal democratic political system that upholds basic
individual freedoms, makes laws by means of an elected parliament
of representatives — which deliberates in generally acceptable terms,
‘filtered’ and ‘translated’ from civil society’s unrestricted delibera-
tions in the informal public sphere — and enforces these laws by
means of an independent judiciary and administration (Habermas
1996, esp. Chs 3–4, 7–8, 1998a: esp. 117–20, 1998d: 215–20, 1998e:
esp. 244–52, 1998f: 254–62).
However, Habermas acknowledges that democratic legitimacy can
no longer be fully achieved in this modern state form. This is because
the increasing interdependencies of national economies and civil socie-
ties, due to such processes as market liberalization and the cross-border
movements of individuals, finance, technology, and trade, raise eco-
nomic, cultural and environmental problems that cannot be resolved
through democratic deliberations at the state level. He has also come
to emphasize that these problems cannot be resolved by extending
democratic deliberations to the global level, particularly since there
is unlikely to be sufficient solidarity among the citizens of different
states (Habermas 2001: 105–9, 2006: 139, 2009b: 116–19, cf. 1998a:
123–27, 1998b: 150–53, 1998c: 182–87, 199, 201). He has therefore
limited his ‘cosmopolitan’ aspirations to the establishment of a sys-
tem of fair negotiations among global actors, legitimated by a global,
‘post- national’ solidarity. He has elaborated this into a three-level
system, comprising state democracies, fair ‘transnational’ negotiations
among extra-state actors affected by political problems that cannot be
resolved at the state level and a ‘supranational’ organization of states (a
reformed United Nations) with responsibility for securing peace and
human rights and supported by a global solidarity regarding such rights
(Habermas 2001: 98–112, 2006: esp. 118–46, 2008d: esp. 314–15,
319–27, 331–35, 342–44, 2009b: 120–26, 2012: esp. 14–20, 53–70).
Yet it is not clear how well this redistribution of political functions
at international levels responds to the requirements of democratic
legitimacy that Habermas affirms at the state level. He envisions the
supranational organization’s responsibilities as being supported and
 Introduction F 5

monitored by a world public and by non-governmental organizations

and he emphasizes the ‘learning processes’ by which state democra-
cies may come to understand themselves as subject to supranational
limits and transnational negotiations. But he considers the suprana-
tional organization responsible merely for protecting liberal limits on
state authority, and not also for making global laws through demo-
cratic deliberations — that is, he considers it responsible for promot-
ing ‘private’, but not ‘public’, autonomy. Among other things, this
marginalizes considerations of material justice at the supranational
level. He also recognizes that the democratic procedures required for
democratic legitimacy, and necessary particularly to regulate markets
and reflect pluralist cultures, will be lacking in transnational negotia-
tions and cannot be compensated for by the ad hoc multiplication of
political bodies or the normatively-unguided coordination of markets
(Habermas 2001: 108–110, 2006: 135–144, 2008d: 322–23, 326–
27, 333–34, 342–52, 2009b: 124–30, 2012: 66–70). Habermas thus
seems to present his global system as both necessary to resolve fun-
damental global problems and incapable of achieving full democratic
legitimation for the solutions that it might provide.
Nor is it clear that Habermas’ theory of liberal democracy at the
state level can be extended to non-‘Western’ states as straightforwardly
as he claims. For its framework of basic individual freedoms and par-
liamentary neutrality excludes more substantial moral and ethical
considerations from institutionalized politics in the name of a political
sense of rationality, albeit one that is also to reflect the unrestricted
public deliberations of civil society. These distinctions between the
private, the public and the state, and the associated vision of the modes
and prospects of political deliberations, clearly echo the trajectories
of ‘Western’ political systems and cultures. But non-‘Western’ states
manifest rather different systems and cultures, insofar as they place
more emphasis on ‘ethical’ values or informal structures than on pri-
vate and public autonomy, say, or manage pluralism and conflict in
authoritarian, religious or market terms. Such differences raise ques-
tions about the kinds of institutional and informal contexts in which
democratic deliberations can operate, and thus about the justifiabil-
ity and feasibility of extending Habermas’ liberal democratic model
beyond the ‘West’. Most evidently perhaps, the basic individual free-
doms which he claims the supranational organization should enforce
in states may not possess quite the universal validity that he supposes.
In Chapter 1 of this book, ‘Back to Kant? The Democratic Deficits
in Habermas’ Global Constitutionalism’, Lars Rensmann criticizes
the global system that Habermas proposes for such democratic
6 f Tom Bailey

failings. Rensmann admits that the extension of democratic delib-

erations to the global level, as initially proposed by Habermas, raises
insurmountable problems of distance, complexity and pluralism, and
thus would tend to reinforce, rather than resolve, the existing defi-
cits in global democratic legitimacy. But he argues that Habermas
now denies democratic legitimation to his global system by limiting
global politics to the negotiation of international laws among states
and by proposing a ‘supranational’ constitution of human rights and
peace that requires at most a weak democratic legitimation. Indeed,
Rensmann suggests that to insist on such a juridified global human
rights regime is extremely dangerous, since by assuming a univer-
sal, ‘rational’ consensus over the interpretation and enforcement of
these rights — a consensus which is in fact lacking — it marginalizes
the politics of global human rights. It would thus allow for exten-
sive ‘humanitarian’ interventions by the supranational authority even
against the democratic sentiments of state and global societies.
To avoid these fundamental problems, Rensmann claims that
Habermas would be well-advised to attend more closely to Immanuel
Kant’s cosmopolitanism, the acknowledged inspiration of his theory.
In particular, Rensmann emphasizes that Kant considers global pub-
licity to be both the condition and the realization of global politics,
and therefore insists that the content and limits of the latter can be
determined only by the former, and not by a philosophical theory
of the kind developed by Habermas. Kant consequently envisions
global politics as evolving towards a federation of states regulated by
global publicity — rather than towards a legally constituted institu-
tion for supranational deliberations, as Habermas’ initial proposals
imply, or simply a forum for the pursuit of autonomous states’ inter-
ests circumscribed by a supra- democratic human rights regime, as
in Habermas’ later theory. Rensmann therefore considers Habermas
to be mistaken in dismissing Kant’s vision for its optimistic ‘moral’
character, for it reflects the constitutive tensions between the moral
and the democratic and between the state and the global better than
Habermas’ own global system and it also responds better to the cur-
rent democratic deficits in global politics. In particular, Rensmann
claims, Kant’s theory reveals the possibilities of exploring cosmo-
politan politics, not from the abstract heights of Habermas’ theory,
but ‘from below’ — that is, by recuperating the democratic concerns
that Habermas insists on at the state level to emphasize the need for
sub-national, national and transnational publics to appropriate and
interpret cosmopolitan rights in their own concrete, particular and
contingent exercises of public autonomy.
 Introduction F 7

In Chapter 2, ‘Democratizing International Law: A Republican

Reading of Habermas’ Cosmopolitan Project’, James Bohman pro-
vides a qualified defence of Habermas’ proposed global system
against doubts such as Rensmann’s. In particular, Bohman compares
Habermas’ system favourably with more and less democratic alter-
natives, while arguing that Habermas himself understates its criti-
cal and democratic potential. For Bohman, to limit cosmopolitan
responsibilities to the moral or the social, and to treat global democ-
racy as at most a means to these extra-political ends, is inadequate
to the demands of democratic legitimacy, the problems raised by
globalization and, indeed, also the current ‘cosmopolitan’ realities
of international institutions and civil society. But he also considers
more demanding theories of global democracy vulnerable to ten-
sions between their opposing deliberative and institutionalized ele-
ments, as well as to the daunting complexity and plurality of existing
global societies and institutions. Bohman thus defends Habermas’
distribution of democratic and other forms of legitimacy across the
national, trans-national and supranational levels, in a system that nei-
ther reduces democracy to a means nor inflates it to a global scope.
Bohman further argues that more extensive democratic legitimacy
and critical leverage can be derived by elaborating on the ‘republican’,
rather than strictly ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal’, character of the system
that Habermas proposes. For, Bohman claims, the republican sense
of freedom as ‘non-domination’ explains how transnational public
spheres could achieve democratic legitimation and autonomy not
directly, by democratic deliberations that realize citizens’ self-legis-
lation, but indirectly, by providing citizens with the recognition and
access to democratic deliberations that would ensure that the terms
of these deliberations are not dictated by others. Bohman claims that
emphasising non-domination would also provide the system with
greater critical leverage on the problems of globalization, such as the
deleterious effects of poverty on political influence, than Habermas
himself allows. While agreeing with Rensmann that the democratic
legitimacy of Habermas’ global system needs strengthening, then
Bohman proposes that the most realistic and critical way of doing
so is not to amplify the role of a Kantian global public, but rather to
emphasize the deliberative and economic implications of the sense of
‘non-domination’ already expressed in the system.
Chapter 3, Kanchana Mahadevan’s ‘Feminist Solidarity in India:
Communitarian Challenges and Postnational Prospects’, also sug-
gests that Habermas understates the democratic and critical
resources available to his global system. However, unlike Bohman
8 f Tom Bailey

and Rensmann, Mahadevan attributes this to certain European preju-

dices of Habermas’ which, she claims, result in a vision of democracy
beyond the ‘West’ that distorts and obscures the deliberative auton-
omy and solidarity on which his system of state and global democracy
is based. She explores this neglected potential by focusing on the case
of women’s political activism in India. She first employs Irigarayian
notions to reveal a fundamental paradox in Indian women’s participa-
tion in right-wing political movements — namely, that in their activ-
ism, these women participate in a shared political identity beyond
women’s traditional, patriarchal roles, whilst simultaneously promot-
ing precisely these roles. However, Mahadevan resists the Irigarayian
tendency to essen-tialize these roles, acknowledging instead the con-
tingencies and complexities of patriarchy, of its intersections with
other social stratifications and women’s responses to it.
Mahadevan therefore turns to Habermas’ sense of a global soli-
darity based in democratic autonomy as a potentially more fruitful
critical framework for analyzing Indian women’s political activism.
In this regard, she affirms his account of the development of indi-
viduals’ and groups’ moral identities through socialization, insofar
as this makes identities depend on communicative interactions of
certain open, egalitarian kinds, rather than treating them as given
by essential ‘natural’ characteristics and maintained in isolation from
others. She also welcomes his claim that such solidarity is now best
pursued beyond the state, since the state separates political commu-
nity from particular ethical worldviews, but also limits it in ways that
globalization now offers prospects for superseding. Yet Mahadevan
argues that the European model underlying Habermas’ conception
of such ‘postnational’ solidarity leads him to obscure its democratic
and critical potential. In particular, she claims, he fails to recognize
the limitations of European democratic politics itself — its margin-
alization of some cultures and its subservience to corporate inter-
ests, for instance — and its hierarchical relations with non-Western
‘others’, reflected in Habermas’ surprisingly naive treatments of
decolonization and Western intervention in non-Western countries.
In response, Mahadevan proposes the Indian feminist movement as
an alternative model of solidarity for Habermas’ global system. As a
non-institutionalized, sub- and trans-national political community,
she claims, this movement responds to the paradoxical limitations
of women’s participation in right-wing movements and provides
resources for criticizing the effects of economic globalization on
women. Mahadevan suggests that the critical, emancipatory poten-
tial of Habermasian democracy can thus be recovered beyond both
the state and Habermas’ own European prejudices.
 Introduction F 9

The prospects for extending Habermas’ theory of democracy

to non-Western and sub-national contexts are also considered
in Chapter 4, ‘Deliberation without Democracy? Reflections on
Habermas, Mini-publics and China’, by William Smith. Smith notes
that in response to the overwhelming obstacles of scale, complexity,
information, and accessibility that beset deliberations in the public
spheres of democratic societies, theorists of deliberative democracy
have recently advocated the use of ‘mini-publics’ as a complement to,
or even a substitute for, deliberations in the broader public sphere.
As small, randomly selected groups of citizens engaged in structured
deliberations over public policies, mini-publics pursue Habermas’
concern with the deliberative legitimacy of state decision-making,
although they lack the informal and unrestricted character of the
broader, ‘macro’ level public spheres which his theory focuses on. Yet
Smith notes that some of the most successful examples of the use of
mini-publics are in China, where both the representative institutions
and the broader public spheres characteristic of democratic societies
are largely lacking. By examining these cases, then, Smith develops
a more sophisticated, Habermasian framework for the evaluation of
mini-publics, consisting of three specific criteria of evaluation. First,
he suggests that mini-publics be evaluated as contributions to the
‘learning processes’ through which Habermas thinks that citizens
come to identify with democratic participation, dialogue and con-
cern for the common good. Second, he proposes that mini-publics
be evaluated according to the discursive rationality of their delibera-
tions, in Habermas’ sense of pursuing solutions to collective prob-
lems that all those affected could accept, as well as according to the
responsiveness of political office holders to them. And finally, Smith
argues that mini-publics should be evaluated as contributions to the
broader public sphere, in which those citizens not involved in a mini-
public’s deliberations may participate. In particular, he proposes
that mini-publics be considered as contributions to the formation of
opinions and the exercise of autonomy by citizens that Habermas
emphasizes as functions of the broader public sphere. Smith shows
that the successful Chinese examples satisfy the first and second cri-
teria surprisingly well, but fail on the third criteria since the broader
public sphere in China is limited by its authoritarian institutions.
He concludes that the hope that mini-publics might help to over-
come the obstacles facing deliberations in the broader public spheres
of democratic and non-democratic states ought to be tempered by
this crucial third criteria. Smith’s framework thus suggests that not
only Habermas’ vision of a global democratic system, but also his
model of state democracy could learn much from examining forms of
10 f Tom Bailey

deliberation in non-democratic, non-‘Western’ societies, and particu-

larly from considering the relations between ‘micro’-level delibera-
tions and broader public spheres and institutions.

Decolonizing
The extension of Habermas’ account of democratic politics outside
its Western locus also raises questions regarding the conceptual and
motivational resources and the form of social coordination that the
account envisions. According to his theory of justificatory commit-
ments, an orientation towards consensus is implicit in any social
action, in the form of ideal requirements to be satisfied if the action
is to be justified to others. Most fundamentally, the theory identi-
fies a principle according to which the generalized justification of
an action must be acceptable to all those affected by the action,
in an open-ended, inclusive and equal dialogue. While the prob-
lems, claims and concepts involved in such a dialogue may derive
from particular contexts, this principle itself is intended to express
a perspective that abstracts from all particular contexts (Habermas
1990a: 57–76, 98–109, 1990b: 120–22, 133–38, 1990c: 196–203,
1993a: 6–17). Crucially, then, by taking this principle as his model
Habermas conceives of social coordination as a matter of rational
justification, and thus as cognitive and dialogical, and as a matter
of universality, reflecting a shared justificatory perspective on par-
ticular interests and values. He consequently insists that the goal of
moral development, or ‘learning’, is the ability to abstract from per-
sonal interests and values and from the affections, conventions and
conceptions of particular groups, for the sake of an autonomy and
solidarity of individuals considered merely as rational interlocutors
(Habermas 1990b: 120–32, 138–70, 1990c: 204–11, 1993b: 30–54,
2003: esp. 256–66). And, while his account of democratic politics
weakens the form of consensus required, it nonetheless extends this
model of action coordination and moral development to political life
by conceiving of democratic procedures as expressing a justificatory
perspective concerned with general rational acceptability and an
associated political sense of autonomy.
As the chapters in Part II of the book show, the problems raised by
this model are made especially evident by a second global challenge to
Habermas’ political theory, that of colonization and decolonization.
For colonization has imposed or obscured, and decolonization has
exacerbated or revealed, resources and forms of social coordination
absent in the colonizing ‘West’, such as ethnic hierarchies, economic
 Introduction F 11

dependencies and alternative political communities. Insofar as such

non-‘Western’ resources and forms resist ‘translation’ into justifica-
tory claims or the rational management of conflicts among them, they
challenge the universality of the justificatory framework of social
coordination on which Habermas’ theory is based. Indeed, they sug-
gest that the cultural knowledge, meanings and reasons of communi-
cative ‘lifeworlds’ do not always admit of such a universal framework
or of Habermas’ strict distinction between it and other, ‘systemic’
forms of coordination. Habermas attempts to accommodate such
challenges not only by admitting various moral, ethical, pragmatic,
and instrumental considerations, as well as socially dispersed forms
of dialogue, into political justification, but also by acknowledging
that ‘ethical’ commitments to good ends and lives attach to particular
cultural contexts and that modernization takes ‘multiple’ forms. Yet
it is far from clear that the resources and forms of social coordination
available in (de)colonized societies can be satisfactorily classified even
in these terms or that they can be subjected to the subordinations
among the moral, the ethical and the democratic that Habermas con-
tinues to insist on.
Chapter 5, Raymond Morrow’s ‘Defending Habermas Against
Eurocentrism: Latin America and Mignolo’s Decolonial Challenge’,
offers a robust defence of Habermas’ theory against such challenges.
Morrow’s focus is on Latin America, where, he notes, Habermas’
theory has become a significant reference point for the study and
discussion of deliberative democracy, civil society and the public
sphere. However, it is also now contested by the ‘decolonial’ pro-
gramme associated with Walter Mignolo. This programme rejects the
epistemic ‘colonization’ of Latin America by ‘Eurocentric’ theories
such as Habermas’ and promotes the ‘liberation’ of the distinctive,
marginalized knowledges and perspectives of the colonized, so as to
reveal their ‘double voice’ as both victims and agents of epistemic
‘colonization’. In response to this challenge, Morrow first argues
that such a wholesale rejection of modern theoretical concepts for
the sake of a radical ‘otherness’ simplifies the multifaceted reality
of Latin America, and particularly the interrelations between the
colonized and the colonizing. He even suggests that, ironically, the
decolonial programme thus echoes the uncritical appeal to a radical
‘other’ of modernity made by much ‘Eurocentric’ theory. Morrow
further argues that, when applied to Habermas, the decolonial chal-
lenge is profoundly misplaced. For Habermas views modernization as
neither inevitable nor singular, recognizes the pathologies associated
with modern ‘systems’ and appreciates the significance of particular,
12 f Tom Bailey

‘ethical’ cultures alongside universal, rational morality. In Morrow’s

view, Habermas also rightly insists on the emancipatory potential of
the ‘Eurocentric’ framework of human rights, insofar as this is open
to reflective interpretation by and among cultures. Indeed, Morrow
concludes his chapter by proposing that, rather than the decolonial
programme, the political concerns associated with colonization and
decolonization in Latin America would be better treated by elaborat-
ing on Habermas’ sense of intercultural learning. Through this learn-
ing, Morrow claims, in decolonized societies marginalized cultures
would engage with ‘modern’ cultures, reciprocally developing their
practical goals and theoretical knowledge towards consensus, just as
Habermas envisions ‘ethical’ cultures also converging on rational,
moral and democratic principles. For Morrow, then, notwithstanding
their justificatory and universalist foundations, Habermas’ accounts
of democracy, ethical culture, modernization, and moral develop-
ment may satisfactorily accommodate the differences of decolonized
societies.
However, in Chapter 6, ‘Care, Power and Deconstructive
Postcolonialism: Reformulating the Habermasian Response’, Richard
Ganis suggests that Morrow’s conclusion is too optimistic. For Ganis
argues that Habermas’ theory can resist the challenges posed by
decolonized societies only if it is supplemented with Axel Honneth’s
notion of ‘care’, so as to provide a richer account of the ‘ethical’.
Ganis articulates the challenge of (de)colonization in deconstructive
postcolonialist terms, focusing on how proponents of deconstruc-
tive postcolonialism — whether informed by a Foucauldian geneal-
ogy of power relations, like Homi Bhabha, or by a Derridean ethics
of unconditional responsibility to the ‘other’, like Gayatri Spivak —
view overarching rationality of the kind envisioned by Habermas’
theory. In particular, he shows how they view such rationality as an
Enlightenment prejudice that obscures the perspectives and mean-
ings of colonial ‘otherness’ and the associated prospects for subvert-
ing dominant colonial frameworks. Unlike Morrow, Ganis considers
Habermas’ idealizing supposition of justificatory consensus and his
recognition of ‘ethical’ commitments to be inadequate responses
to this challenge. In particular, he emphasizes that, however well
Habermas’ notion of the ‘ethical’ recognizes the affective, asymmet-
rical and partial nature of our responses to others, Habermas none-
theless subordinates them to the rational, symmetrical and impartial
principles of morality and democracy. Indeed, he reads Habermas’
dismissal of a caricatured Derrida — for appealing to a transcendent
‘otherness’, beyond the grasp of communicative rationality, and thus
 Introduction F 13

reducing justification to mere ‘taste’ — as symptomatic of Habermas’

failure to appreciate the challenge of (de)colonization to his theory.
To respond more adequately to this challenge, Ganis proposes to
weaken Habermas’ subordination of the ethical to the rational by
employing Honneth’s account of caring recognition as an ‘ethical’
response that makes possible, even as it is ultimately eclipsed by,
moral and political rationality. For Ganis, such a reformulation of
Habermas’ theory would accommodate the deconstructive postco-
lonialist concern for the non-cognitive and the ‘other’ without aban-
doning the authority of the rational norms that underlie Habermas’
critical morality and politics. He claims that this reformulation would
also uphold Habermas’ attendant distinction between lifeworld and
system, which both Honneth and deconstructive postcolonialists risk
blurring — Honneth by situating caring recognition at the ‘concep-
tual and genetic’ foundation not only of communicative relations, but
also of relations in modern economic and administrative systems,
and deconstructive post- colonialists by treating all social relations
as relations of power or otherness. Thus, for Ganis, to respond to the
challenge of (de)colo nization, the attitude of ‘care’ must be admit-
ted into Habermas’ justificatory and universalist account of action
coordination in modern societies, and this can be done without sur-
rendering the crucial theoretical and critical distinctions between
normativity, care and power.
In contrast, in Chapter 7, ‘From Communicative Modernity to
Modernities in Tension’, John Rundell argues that Habermas can avoid
charges of ‘Eurocentrism’ only by abandoning precisely the emphasis
on justification that both Morrow and Ganis wish to preserve. Taking
a broader perspective on the resources for social coordination avail-
able in a globalized modernity, Rundell admits that Habermas’ the-
ory identifies standards for the rational resolution of social problems
which are not limited to specific contexts and that it rightly avoids
reducing the ‘modern’ to any single distinctive element or logic. But
he considers the scope and critical potential of Habermas’ theory
to be limited by its exclusive focus on justificatory social coordina-
tion and the threats to it deriving from non-justificatory ‘systems’.
For Rundell, the disposition to communicative reasoning, like social
understandings in general, itself rests on non-rational, non-linguis-
tic ‘imaginaries’ that — rather than reflecting a singular ‘rational’,
or ‘normative’, logic of the kind identified by Habermas’ universal
justificatory perspective — are inevitably contingent, indeterminate
and cross-cutting. Indeed, Rundell proposes that ‘modernity’ be
understood precisely as the contingency of six distinct imaginaries
14 f Tom Bailey

and their variable degrees and intersections. Specifically, he presents

modern markets as an imaginary of abstraction and limitlessness;
modern industry as one of specialized, and yet depersonalized, func-
tions; modern art as a transcendence of the worldly and of traditional
stylistic communities; and the modern state as an imaginary of ter-
ritorial and cultural inclusion and exclusion that competes with a
democratic imaginary of consensus and an imaginary of limitless
expression in the public sphere. If these imaginaries create irreduc-
ible ‘tensions’ within modern societies and an irreducible multiplicity
among them, Rundell claims, then problems of social coordination
arise which cannot be treated from a single conceptual and evaluative
perspective — that is, they manifest an irreducible dissonance, rather
than the potential for rational consensus that Habermas envisions.
Indeed, Rundell concludes by suggesting that the contingent, disso-
nant character of modernities is most evident in the sense of limitless
expression associated with the imaginary of the public sphere, on the
condition that this is freed from the rationalist, universalist preoc-
cupations manifested in Habermas’ deliberative theory.

Desecularizing
The third and final part of the book considers a third global challenge
with which Habermas has engaged, that of religions. As he has come
to emphasize, religions play persisting and novel roles in modern soci-
eties — one thinks particularly of the United States, the Middle East
and Western Europe. Yet recognizing these roles risks destabilizing
fundamental elements of his theory, from his emphasis on justifica-
tory claims and on moral development towards autonomy to his func-
tionalist and evolutionary treatment of society and his attempt to
articulate his theory in ‘post-metaphysical’ terms. Indeed, in view
of such commitments, he had previously relegated religions to mere
remnants of the pre-modern, to be at most ‘translated’ into secular
terms by modern communicative reasoning (Habermas 2002a: esp.
72–78, 2002b: esp. 133–38, 2002c: 150–54, 159–64). And, while
now admitting that religions play roles in modern societies that he
had not previously anticipated, Habermas tends to interpret these
roles in ways that limit their destabilizing implications for his the-
ory. In particular, he insists that while members of modern societies
may perceive a ‘return’ of religions to public and private life — due
to such things as immigration, political activism by religious groups
and the interpretation of global conflicts in religious terms — the
functional differentiation of spheres in these societies nonetheless
 Introduction F 15

precludes religions’ serving to coordinate social actions. In this sense,

then, he continues to insist that modernization implies seculariza-
tion (Habermas 2008b: 116–18, 2008c: 211, 238–40, 2008e: 17–21,
2009a: 62–65, Mendieta 2010: 1–4, 8, 10-11). He also argues that the
political issues raised by religions — regarding such things as abortion
and euthanasia, homosexuality and the veil — are most satisfactorily
resolved by excluding religious arguments from parliamentary delib-
erations, to ensure that the latter are equally accessible to all, while
preserving a private sphere of individual freedom and opening the
public sphere to all arguments — which must therefore be ‘filtered’,
or ‘translated’, if they are to enter parliamentary deliberations. He
considers this liberal democratic treatment of religions to be fair to
religious citizens and to promote the ‘mutual learning’ by which both
the religious and the secular may abandon claims to exclusive author-
ity, each recognizing the insights offered by the other and commit-
ting to the liberal democratic framework (Habermas 2008a: 111–13,
2008b: 120–40, 2008c: 238–40, 245–46, 2008e: 22–29, 2009a:
66–77, 2010: 18–23, 2011: 23–28; Mendieta 2010: 1–2, 9–12).
Ultimately, then, Habermas recognizes a ‘postsecular’ consciousness,
but appears to leave the secular foundations of his political theory
untouched.
It is far from clear that this is an adequate response to the roles
of religions in modern societies. In particular, insofar as religious
worldviews are irreducible to justificatory claims and to the universal,
autonomous moral and political requirements that Habermas takes
such claims to imply, a consciousness of a ‘return’ of these worldviews
to public and private life would seem to require a more substantial
reconsideration of the nature and standards of his justificatory frame-
work, much as (de)colonized societies also appear to do. It would also
entail less smooth engagements between the religious and the secular
than the ‘mutual learning’ and the resulting rational ‘autonomy’ that
Habermas envisions. Given the variety of cognitive and motivational
resources available, other outcomes are surely imaginable, including
ones less benign than Habermas’ liberal democratic reconciliation,
and it would seem arbitrary to dismiss these as due merely to ‘distor-
tions’ in communication or ‘deficits’ in learning. Indeed, Habermas
himself admits that the political consciousnesses of religious and non-
religious citizens in postsecular societies are ‘unpredictable’, since
they develop not only through cognitive learning, but also in non-
cognitive and non-political ways (2008b: 144; see also 143–47, 2008c:
245–46). Furthermore, to limit the role of religions in modern socie-
ties to a perceived ‘return’ of religions in once apparently ‘secular’
16 f Tom Bailey

societies is to marginalize the far more substantive roles they play in

coordinating modern societies, within and beyond the ‘West’. One
thinks, for instance, of recent developments in North Africa, as well
as the influence of neo-Protestant movements in the United States.
And Habermas himself admits that a postmetaphysical theory like
his, even with its liberal democratic framework, lacks the resources to
elucidate and cultivate the social solidarity — the non-coercive coop-
eration, or shared ‘faith’ — which is necessary to combat the over-
extension of modern ‘systems’ and which religions instead provide
(2008c: 209–11, 223–29, 238–40, 242, 245).
In the light of such concerns, two chapters in Part III undertake
to defend the secular character of Habermas’ theory of rationality
and the account of democratic politics that he bases on it. In ‘What is
Living and What is Dead in Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis?’,
Kevin W. Gray focuses on the worry that Habermas’ insistence on
the secularization of modern societies is vulnerable to the criticisms
standardly made of Max Weber’s corresponding conception, to which
Habermas is much indebted. In particular, by treating modern ration-
alization simply as the extension of instrumental rationality at the
expense of irrational worldviews like religions, Weber’s conception
not only denudes modernity of any overarching rational resources for
evaluating the goals pursued by instrumental rationality, but is also
vulnerable to a wealth of counter examples, from resistance to the
Catholic church in Europe in the Middle Ages to the re-Islamization
of developed societies in the contemporary Middle East.
Gray therefore undertakes to show how, in appropriating Weber’s
conception of secularization, Habermas also reformulates it in a way
that — albeit without his full awareness — avoids the criticisms made
of Weber without undermining the fundamental role of seculariza-
tion in Habermas’ theory of rationality and account of democracy.
In particular, Gray emphasizes how Habermas conceives of modern
rationalization in terms of senses of communicative rationality which
extend beyond the instrumental, and which thus present new critical
possibilities for modern societies, particularly in the democratic form
of law and the associated public sphere. Crucially, Gray points out,
such rationalization need involve ‘secularization’ only in the modest
sense that it brings with it a multiplication of functional spheres and
thus a normative pluralism which precludes overarching worldviews
like religions from providing realistic solutions to social coordination
problems. Thus, Gray concludes, the roles that religions may continue
to play in modern societies need not undermine Habermas’ ‘secular’
claim that ultimately only communicative rationality, particularly in
its democratic form, can coordinate actions in such societies.
 Introduction F 17

In Chapter 9, ‘Reason and Li Xing: A Chinese Solution to Habermas’

Problem of Moral Motivation’, Tong Shijun also suggests that the sec-
ular character of Habermas’ theory should be upheld in the face of
religious challenges. However, Tong argues that this requires a recon-
ceptualization of Habermas’ understanding of communicative reason-
ing itself. He focuses on the problem of explaining agents’ motivation
to endorse the normative commitments that Habermas’ theory identi-
fies — a problem which Tong, following Habermas, articulates in Max
Horkheimer’s terms, as the apparent ‘impossibility of deriving from
reason any fundamental argument against murder’. Tong believes that
Habermas is mistaken in turning to religions for such motivation in
modern, secular societies. Instead, he argues, Habermas’ theory of
rationality can be enriched so as to provide for both justification and
motivation by employing the Chinese philosopher, Liang Shuming’s
notion of a distinctive Chinese rationality, ‘xi ling’. Liang presents this
rationality as universal and communicative in its independence from
instincts, goods and force, and yet also as relative to context and moti-
vating through feeling. For Tong, Liang thus shows how principles of
a Habermasian, communicatively rational kind can be conceived as
motivating. Tong further claims that the spiritual sense that Liang gives
to such rationality, in its embracing all agents in an ‘impersonal feel-
ing’, shows how this motivation can be conceived without the substan-
tial, pre-modern senses of religious transcendence to which Habermas
himself problematically appeals in attempting to solve the problem of
motivation. Tong concludes by suggesting that Liang’s sense of rational-
ity remains available to Chinese political and public reasoning, despite
the evident failures to realize it in the past and the present.
However, in the final chapter, ‘Radicalizing the Post-secular
Thesis, Provincializing Habermas’, Peter Losonczi suggests that even
such defences of the secular character of Habermas’ political theory
are insufficient. Indeed, Losonczi argues that Habermas’ own appre-
ciation of the ‘postsecular’ nature of contemporary societies, and thus
of the doubtful association of modernization with secularization, is
insufficiently sensitive to the religious plurality that these societies
manifest. For although he now recognizes the public significance of
religions in once-secular societies, Habermas nonetheless insists on
the ‘existential security’ — the lack of a ‘need’ for religions — that
members of modern societies experience. In Losonczi’s view, this
represents a shift away from the rationalization and functional dif-
ferentiation that Habermas previously claimed would make modern
societies secular, but it also leaves Habermas with an impoverished
sense of the rich range of forms, roles and ‘modern’ elements that reli-
gions have in contemporary societies. In response, Losonczi suggests
18 f Tom Bailey

that the account of a postsecular ‘consciousness’ which Habermas

presents alongside his questionable sociological claims offers more
promising possibilities. In particular, he proposes to liberate this
account from Habermas’ insistence on subordinating religions to a sin-
gle, universal justificatory perspective, and from the associated senses
of ‘autonomy’ and ‘learning’, by elaborating it in terms of the Catholic
theologian, Lieven Boeve’s criticism of the Catholic Church’s strat-
egy of merely ‘correlating’ Catholic with secular principles. Doing
so, Losonczi claims, results in a conception of the dynamic intercon-
nections that exist between religious and secular cultures as mutual
‘recontextualizations’.
This reformulated account of postsecular ‘consciousness’, he con-
cludes, better accommodates the creative possibilities for justifica-
tory dialogue and acceptance within and between different religions,
and also reveals the particular religious origins of Habermas’ sense of
communicative rationality itself.

Conclusions
By testing and extending it outside its original ‘Western’ context,
then, these chapters suggest reformulations and supplementations to
Habermas’ theory which would render it more comprehensive and
critical in its treatment of global political problems. To provide the
global system that Habermas proposes with more extensive demo-
cratic legitimation and critical leverage, and to free his model of state
democracy of its ‘Western’ peculiarities, the chapters in Part I turn
to the potentials of deliberations in sub- and extra- state publics.
Those in Part II explore the non-rational and contingent resources
of modern societies with a view to determining how far the realities
of non-‘Western’, (de)colonized societies can be accommodated in a
justificatory and universalist framework of the kind that Habermas
insists on. And the chapters in part III suggest that the justifica-
tory status, scope and motivational force of this framework require
further reformulations if it is to respond to the roles of religions in
modern societies. Indeed, the overall project of ‘deprovincializing’
Habermas’ theory pursued by all of the chapters may be perhaps
compared with the peculiar task that he himself attributes to theo-
rists and to citizens of postsecular societies in their dealings with
religions: the task of ‘translating’ religious meanings into criticizable
justificatory claims. For while he claims that the Western philosophi-
cal tradition has ‘learned’ some of its most fundamental concepts
from such translations, he also admits that religions must ultimately
 Introduction F 19

remain ‘opaque’, or ‘cognitively unacceptable’, to philosophy or rea-

son (Habermas 2008b: 143, 2008c: 242; see also 2008a: 104–11,
2008b: 135–42, 2011: 25–28; Mendieta 2010: 4–10). In analogous
ways, the deprovincializing ‘translation’ of Habermas’ theory into
non-‘Western’ contexts and terms appears to involve reflective refor-
mulations as well as incomprehensions on both sides. While much of
this dialectical project remains to be explored — one thinks of prob-
lematic concepts like social ‘development’ and the ‘Western’ itself,
examined only indirectly here — the contributions to this book make
pioneering attempts to envision a ‘deprovincialized’ Habermasian
political theory, one ‘translated’ into genuinely global terms.1

References
Habermas, Jürgen. 1990a. ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program
of Philosophical Justification’, in Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber
Nicholsen, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 43–115.
———. 1990b. ‘Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action’, in
Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian
Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 116–94.
———. 1990c. ‘Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel’s Critique of
Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?’, in Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber
Nicholsen, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 195–215.
———. 1993b. ‘Remarks on Discourse Ethics’, in Justification and
Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 19–111.
———. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse
Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass.

1
I would like to thank Jim Bohman, Maeve Cooke, Richard Ganis,
Ray Morrow, Will Smith, and John Rundell for their helpful comments
on a draft of this introduction; Aakash Singh Rathore for his assistance
in preparing the collection; and Vivienne Matthies-Boon and the Centre
for Globalisation Studies at the University of Groningen for hosting a
workshop, ‘Global Perspectives on Habermas’, at which drafts of some of
the chapters were discussed.
20 f Tom Bailey

———. 1998a. ‘The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of

Sovereignty and Citizenship’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 105–27.
———. 1998b. ‘On the Relation between the Nation, the Rule of Law and
Democracy’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory,
eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 129–53.
———. 1998c. ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred
Years’ Historical Remove’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 165–201.
———. 1998d. ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic
Constitutional State’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 203–36.
———. 1998e. ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, in The Inclusion
of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo
De Greiff, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 239–52.
———. 1998f. ‘On the Internal Relation between the Rule of Law and
Democracy’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory,
eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 253–64.
———. 2001. ‘The Postnational Constellation and the Future of
Democracy’, in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans.
Max Pensky, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 58–112.
———. 2002a. ‘Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this
World’, in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and
Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta, Polity Press, Cambridge, 67–94.
———. 2002b. ‘Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason Belong?
Johannes Baptist Metz on Unity amidst Multicultural Plurality’, in
Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, ed.
Eduardo Mendieta, Polity Press, Cambridge, 129–38.
———. 2002c. ‘A Conversation about God and World: Interview with
Eduardo Mendieta’, in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason,
God and Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta, Polity Press, Cambridge,
147–67.
———. 2003. ‘Rightness versus Truth: On the Sense of Normative
Validity in Moral Judgments and Norms’, in Truth and Justification,
trans. Barbara Fultner, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 237–75.
———. 2006. ‘Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still
Have a Chance?’, in The Divided West, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 115–93.
 Introduction F 21

———. 2008a. ‘Prepolitical Foundations of the Constitutional State?’, in

Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 101–13.
———. 2008b. ‘Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions
for the “Public Use of Reason” by Religious and Secular Citizens’, in
Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 114–47.
———. 2008c. ‘The Boundary between Faith and Knowledge: On the
Reception and Contemporary Importance of Kant’s Philosophy of
Religion’, in Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays,
trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 209–47.
———. 2008d. ‘A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?’,
in Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans.
Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 312–52.
———. 2008e. ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives
Quarterly 25(4): 17–29.
———. 2009a. ‘What is Meant by a “Post-Secular Society”? A Discussion
on Islam in Europe’, in Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 59–77.
———. 2009b. ‘The Constitutionalization of International Law and
the Legitimation Problems of a Constitution for World Society’,
in Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 109–30.
———. 2010. ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in An Awareness of
What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age, trans. Ciaran
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 15–23.
———. 2011. ‘“The Political”: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable
Inheritance of Political Theology’, in Eduardo Mendieta and
Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), The Power of Religion in the Public
Sphere, Columbia University Press, New York, 15–33.
———. 2012. ‘The Crisis of the European Union in Light of a
Constitutionlization of International Law: An Essay on the
Constitution for Europe’ in The Crisis of the European Union: A
Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1–70.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2010. ‘A Postsecular World Society? On the
Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the
Multicultural World Society: An Interview with Jürgen Habermas’,
trans. Matthias Fritsch, The Immanent Frame, https://tif.ssrc.org/
wp-content/uploads/2010/02/A-Postsecular-World-Society-TIF.pdf
(accessed 8 February 2022).
 Part I
Democratizing


1
Back to Kant?
The Democratic Deficits in Habermas’
Global Constitutionalism
Lars Rensmann

In 2006, Jürgen Habermas raised the question, ‘Does the consti-

tutionalization of international law still have a chance?’ With this, he
presupposes that a constitutionalized framework of global public law,
enabling the global ‘normative taming of political power through law’
(Habermas 2006: 116), is required to enact cosmopolitan norms and
to ensure international peace and security. His question also indicates
his fear that the process of such normatively desirable cosmopolitan
constitutionalization is under threat, not only because governments
bend existing rules to national interests, but also because global con-
stitutionalism and the universal juridification of international rela-
tions themselves face a legitimation crisis.
In the light of this concern, this chapter seeks to offer a critical
reappraisal of two different models of global constitutionalism pro-
posed by Habermas that respond to Immanuel Kant’s cosmopoli-
tanism and seek to move beyond it. In particular, I will argue that
although Habermas’ models absorb Kant’s cosmopolitan intuitions
and contribute important resources for critiquing resilient nationalist
fictions and sovereigntist shortcomings, cultural relativism and arbi-
trary justice, they also risk fetishizing what he presupposes a priori to
be universally consensual, rational and binding formal constitutional
principles. Without pretending to offer an exhaustive treatment of
his cosmopolitan writings, I will show how far Habermas’ rational-
ist conception of cosmopolitan law thus departs from his discursive
theory of deliberative democracy and its emphasis on politically, cul-
turally and communicatively grounded democratic legitimation. In
effect, I will argue, Habermas replaces the latter with the classical
liberal priority of transcendentally-grounded formal human rights

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329586-3
26 f Lars Rensmann

and gestures towards standardized procedures to determine if and

when global law enforcement is justified. Habermas’ conception of
cosmopolitan law thereby sidelines the effective conditions of public
autonomy, which his own theory of deliberative democracy identifies
as necessary to regulate the implementation of rights and any other
legitimate legal principles.
I will further argue that, in this, Habermas’ global constitutional-
ism is more ‘Kantian’, or rigorously formalistic, than Kant himself.
For, unlike Habermas and despite his own formalism, Kant also
recognizes the practical limitations of coercive cosmopolitan law
without the proper public conditions, revealing tensions in the cos-
mopolitan project that cannot be resolved philosophically, but only
through political ‘translations’, mediations and appropriations. Thus,
while Habermas offers some important new conceptual insights into
the changing conditions of human rights, democracy and constitu-
tionalism, reflecting post-Westphalian developments that Kant could
not foresee, his ‘fundamental conceptual revision’ (Habermas 1998b:
179) tends to suffocate the crucial political space in Kant’s cosmopol-
itanism and gloss over constitutive tensions of which Kant remains
acutely aware. As a corrective to the democratic deficit and top-down
elements of Habermas’ models, then, it is worth reconsidering his
own earlier accounts of democratic deliberation, which embrace the
potentially unsettling power of diverse (trans)national democratic
publics and allocate a central place to self-legislating and deliberating
subjects (Scheuerman 2008). I will suggest that such an approach
reflects Kant’s political moment and conception of public right more
faithfully and ultimately provides for a more robust sense of human
rights politics and of cosmopolitanism ‘from below’.

Kant’s Cosmopolitanism and Habermas’ Critique

In his theoretical reflections on the ‘cosmopolitan question’, Habermas
consistently takes Kant as his point of departure. He recognizes that
Kant not only develops several groundbreaking modern political-
philosophical conceptions of the cosmopolitan condition and cosmo-
politan public right, but also, by suggesting that ‘the peoples of the
earth’ have started to evolve into a ‘universal community’ in which
‘the violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’
(Kant 1795: 107), is the first to conceive of the global public inter-
connectedness that now informs global politics. Such a global public
not only serves a critical function in Kant’s envisioned cosmopolitan
condition — it is also the latter’s very precondition. For in Kant’s
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 The State, here, amongst ourselves, had, throughout the whole of
this middle period, been asserting that it had a domain in which it
was supreme; that the Church had usurped a great part of this
domain, and was still endeavouring to extend its usurpations; and
that there could be no peace till the whole of this usurped ground
had been recovered. At last the State became sufficiently
enlightened and strong to establish its supremacy in the domain it
claimed; and to estop the Church from its usurpations. This was a
great gain. The work, however, was very far from having been
completed. What was done, though much, was in truth only a
beginning. What further was required was that the State should
forthwith address itself to the discharge of the high and fruitful duties
that belonged to the position it had assumed. But the fact was that it
did not yet fully and clearly perceive either what had become its own
sphere, rights, and duties, or what had become the sphere, rights,
and duties of the Church. Some, indeed, of the conceptions it formed
on these points were entirely erroneous, as both the teaching of
History—now better understood—and the inconveniences, the evils,
and the necessities of our present condition have since
demonstrated. The correction of these errors is a very important part
of the task of the present generation. The unsettled character of the
actual relation of the State and of the Church to each other, and the
resultant uneasiness and tenderness felt by each, and the way in
which, by these causes, each is at present crippled for much good it
might be doing, are to be attributed to these errors. These are
matters in which History is our only guide and interpreter. A
knowledge of the origin, nature, aims, and fortunes of this long
conflict in past times, enables us to understand its present position,
and to foresee its future course. We are at a certain point in a chain
of events: and nothing throws light on the events that are coming
except the events that have been now evolved.
When ideas, through their having been traditional for many
generations, have got a strong hold on men’s thoughts and feelings,
it is impossible to break away from them, and in some matters to
face in the very opposite direction, at a moment. Ideas grow, and
decay: they are not subject to instantaneous transformations, like the
figures in a kaleidoscope. This explains the partial acquiescence by
the State in the theory that the Church was only the State acting in
another capacity: as it were a committee of the whole House for
some politically necessary objects; and with an authority that must
be maintained. There was merely a colourable amount of truth in
this. Practically, and relatively to the condition society had reached, it
was a mistake; and one that was unworkable in every particular. The
Church, whatever might have been the case in the early stages of
society, is not now the State in another capacity. It has ceased to
have now any directly political objects. It has no authority in the
sense in which the State has: the authority of the State being such
as can be enforced by pains and penalties, and by physical
constraints; whereas the authority of the Church is only that of moral
and of intellectual truth—as much as, and no more than, it claimed
eighteen hundred years ago. In this matter its present advantages
are that it has not to contend for existence against hostile
established religions, and a consequently hostile tone of morality and
of society; for what is now generally recognized, in the moral order,
is precisely its own principles.
The logical and practical issue of this mistake was the
mischievous conclusion that the teaching of all morality, including
that which is necessary for the order and well-being of modern
societies, must be left exclusively to the Church; and that the State
must confine its own action to the repression of crime, and to the
protection of person and of property; and this only by the way of
punishment. Now each of these two propositions has, in a certain
sense, and from a certain point of view, though not those belonging
to these times, enough plausibility to enable a kind of defence of it to
be set up; but, at the same time, each contains such an amount of
real falsity to the existing circumstances and conditions of society, as
to issue in incalculable mischief both to the State and to the Church;
both in what it has caused, and is causing, to be done, and in what it
has hindered, and is hindering, from being done.
This was a mistake which assigned to the Church work, which
what have now become its constitution, its real objects, and the
means and forces at its disposal, incapacitate it from doing; and
which led the State to abdicate what is now its highest, and really
paramount, function. It put both the Church and the State in a wrong
position, and on a wrong path. It enfeebled, depraved, and shackled
both. It brought them into inevitable conflict with each other. It made
them both aim at what could never be more than very imperfectly
attained by the means they were respectively endeavouring to
employ. Its results were confusion, anarchy, and failure. Hence came
about the neglect by the State of national education. And hence the
claims of the Church to educate the nation. Hence the fierce
contradictions to these claims, expressed in a blind demand, as if
that were the only way of effectually contradicting them, for secular
education, that is to say, for the exclusion of morality from education,
and its limitation to an acquaintance with the instruments of
knowledge, plus a little physical instruction. This would make things
far worse than they are at present. It would be prohibiting the
acquisition, by those who are now the depositories of power, of the
knowledge and sentiments requisite for its right use. It would be
creating, and setting at work, in the midst of us, the most efficient
machinery imaginable for the general demoralization of the
community. It would be going some way towards transforming the
commonwealth into an aggregation of wild beasts, but of wild beasts
possessed of knowledge and reason. The concession of this by the
State would be the renunciation of its first and most imperative duty.
Hence, in short, all the imbroglio and the evils of the present
situation of this great question; and all the misunderstandings and
hot conflicts between those on the one hand, whom logic, working
with wrong data, has made secularists, but to the exclusion of
secular morality, the chief point of all, and, on the other hand, those
whose fealty to what is highest and best, and should be supreme in
man’s nature, even when regarded only as a political animal, has
obliged them to enrol themselves as supporters of (I am afraid we
must say internecine) denominational teaching in the education of
the people. It is obvious that, as it is the duty of the State to regard
the community as a single family, and to endeavour to bring its
members to act harmoniously together, it would be better, both
theoretically and practically, to exclude the inculcation of these
differences from the Schools of the State: that, if it must come, would
come with less evil from the denominations themselves.
 But truth, reason, right, and History must in the end triumph. It is
the duty of the State, and we rigidly exact from it the performance of
it, to punish and repress crime: it must, therefore, be its duty, but this
we will not allow it to perform, to teach that kind of morality which
manifestly has a tendency to prevent the commission of crime. The
evil is done when the crime has been committed: à fortiori, then, it is
better to prevent than to punish it. It is the duty of the State, and we
energetically insist on its being discharged effectually, to protect
person and property: à fortiori, then, it must be its duty to teach that
morality which shall dispose men to respect the rights of person and
of property. It is the duty of the State to do what it can, within its own
sphere, to promote the well-being of its members; we may presume,
then, that it is its duty to teach that morality which shall have a
tendency, above every thing else the State can do, to secure this
great object. How can it be argued that the State does rightly and
wisely in neglecting the one means which stands first in the order of
nature, and which is emphatically the most efficient, for bringing
about its great paramount object? To deny that the means for doing
this duty are within its sphere, is to deny that it has any duty at all,
except that of punishing. Possibly such means may not be within the
sphere, as some define it, of the political Economist. But, though a
Statesman ought to be a political Economist, he ought to be
something besides. And it may be very bad political Economy to
allow in these days the mass of the people to be vicious. This may,
in the highest degree, be destructive of wealth. But, at all events,
what the Statesman has to lay his measures for is the well-being of
the community, of which wealth is only one ingredient; and which,
too, may be so distributed, and so used, and productive of such
effects and influences, looking at the community generally, as on the
whole not to promote its well-being. At all events, man, even when
regarded in his social capacity exclusively, does not live either by, or
for, bread alone.
The present condition of society is never to be lost sight of. And
the two most prominent elements of its present condition are the
general diffusion, throughout all classes, of political power, which
almost means that the decision of political questions has been
entrusted to the most ignorant and uninstructed, because they are
the most numerous, part of the community; and the fact that every
member of the community is now required to think, and to act, and to
take charge of, and to provide for himself. Here are two reasons,
which have made it as much the duty of the State to teach, as to
repress, and to punish; for knowledge, and this means pre-eminently
moral knowledge, has become quite as necessary to it for self-
preservation. Though, indeed, punishment is a mode of teaching,
and the policeman and the magistrate are a kind of teachers; but it is
as unreasonable, as suicidal, to have recourse to no other mode of
teaching, and to no other kind of teachers.
I think, then, that none but unstatesmanlike Economists will deny
that it is the duty of the State to see to the education of the whole
people. The Egyptian Priest, and the Hebrew Prophet, never made,
nor could have made, a mistake of this kind; to their apprehension
the right training of the people was the paramount duty of a
Government—the very purpose and object for which it existed. This
must, amongst ourselves, be given mainly in schools established
everywhere. We have now at last got so far as to attempt their
general establishment. The schools, however, are only machinery;
and the great question is, what kind of work this machinery is to do?
and the State will not discharge properly its duty in this all-important
matter, if it does not take care that the schools shall teach the
morality indispensably required, under existing conditions, for the
well-being of society. This morality means the principles of Justice,
Truth, Temperance, Honesty, Manliness, Forbearance, Considerate
Kindliness, Industry, Thrift, Foresight, Responsibility. These are
political and social, and perhaps also economical, necessities of
modern communities. They are now the first great wants of society.
Speaking generally, they can be taught to the masses of the people,
and to the whole people, best, and, in fact, only by the State. Every
one, I think, must be ready to acknowledge, that if the State, during
the last fifty years, had seen to their having been taught, so far as
schools and early training could have taught them, to the population
of this country, we should be in a widely different position—all the
difference being on the right side—from that in which we are at this
day.
 It is just because the State has made, at best, only half-hearted
attempts to do any part of this work, and has even at times loudly
proclaimed that it saw that it was not its duty to undertake it, that is to
say that it was its duty to renounce its most important duty, that that
part of the community in which the moral instinct predominates, has
turned to Church organizations, and called upon them to undertake
it. And this is a reason why many of this class have been attracted to
that particular branch of the Church which advances, most loudly,
the most unqualified claims to the superintendence of the whole
domain of morality, not making any distinction between that which is
social, civil, and political, and that which belongs to the higher
sphere of the spiritual life. Had the State seen its duty in this great
matter, and endeavoured to act up to it, nothing of this kind would, or
could, have occurred. On the contrary: the wisest and best part of
the community would have supported it in carrying out what it had
undertaken, with their whole heart and soul.
Of course it is a mistake to look to the Church for this kind of work.
Neither the Church of Rome, nor any other Church, either in this, or
in any other, country, has the means necessary for enforcing this
kind of teaching, or even for bringing it home, generally, to the bulk
of the population, that is to say to the very part of it which most
needs it. Nor under any conjuncture of circumstances, which can be
imagined as possible, will they have the means for doing it. And
even further, if the powers necessary for the purpose could be
conferred upon them, it would be putting them in a false position to
call upon them to undertake this mundane, political work. Besides
that, the false positions into which events and circumstances have
already, more or less, brought all Churches, have so damaged their
credit with large proportions of the population, in all the foremost
nations of the world, as that their teaching of this kind would not,
generally, be received, would even be strenuously resisted; and it
would still further weaken them, were they to attempt to teach these
things for these purposes. It would bring them before the world as
mere instruments of national police—a position that is now so utterly
and glaringly at discord with the purpose and idea of a Church, that
its assumption would go a long way towards obscuring altogether in
men’s minds that purpose, and that idea; far too much in that
direction having been done already. We know how disastrous an
effect the assumption, to some extent, of this position has had, in
this and other countries, on some branches of the Church. This is
true now, and will continue to be so, till the Church shall have
become an organization in which all of us, laity as well as clergy,
women as well as men, who shall be animated by the desire for the
higher moral and spiritual life, shall find ready for us places and
work; and until, in this matter, the first effort amongst us shall not be
to secure this-world power, and social and political position, which
must always be accompanied by separations and antagonisms, and
is demoralizing, and destructive of the very idea of a Church; but to
reform and improve, and to lift above the world; an effort which is
actively and fruitfully moral, and of the very essence of the work of a
Church. This is truly spiritual work.
Taking things, then, as they are, any Church would be but a bad
and inefficient teacher of the political, we may even call it the
secular, kind of morality we are now thinking about. While every one
can see that, as it is an affair of the State, and comes within its
sphere, and is useful for its purposes; and as it is the duty, and the
interest, of the State to teach it; and as the State has, and alone has,
the power of teaching it, it might be well and properly taught by the
State. But it may also be remarked that no Church can afford to give
to this work of the State the first place in its thoughts and efforts.
Every branch of the Church, from the greatest down to the least,
must be occupied, primarily, by its own necessities. Self-preservation
is the first law of nature, in the case of Churches as well as of every
thing else that has life. The first care, therefore, as things now are, of
every Church must be to maintain and enforce its own system; and,
as part of the same effort, to weaken those whose systems are
opposed to its own. This, however disguised, must be a main object
with all of them. That it is so, is very disastrous for Churches; still it is
a necessity of their present position. And the efforts that arise out of
this necessity can, at the best, be only non-moral: in truth, one
cannot but think that they must generally be demoralizing, and even
immoral: at all events, they can only be made at the expense of the
higher morality, which is the true domain of the Church. But, however
much this point may be controverted, the other is an obvious fact,
and incontrovertible, that no Church has the power of teaching to the
community, and this is especially true of the most numerous and
least instructed part of the community, that morality which is now
necessary for the well-being of political societies. In this matter there
is a wide difference between past and present times. Formerly this
teaching, however desirable it might have been, was not
indispensable under the old restrictive and paternal systems of
society. All that has now passed away. We have drifted from those
moorings, and out of those harbours. Our population has been
agglomerated into large masses; and these masses have been put
into a position to exercise the power which resides in numbers.
Every one, too, is now called upon, and this is a most important
element in the consideration of what ought to be done, to take care
of himself. No class is now put in charge of another class. The moral
training, therefore, which these conditions require has become the
paramount object and first duty of the State; and, one way or
another, perhaps the highest personal mundane interest of every
member of the community; and all would do well to demand from the
State the discharge of this duty.
That the State should awake to a sense of its duty in this matter,
and act up to that awakened sense, would be no encroachment on
the domain of the Church. In so doing, indeed, it would set free, and
strengthen, the Church for its own proper work. The State cannot do
the work of the Church, any more than the Church can do the work
of the State. Each has now, distinctly, marked out for it its own
sphere, its own aims, its own rights, and its own duties. The world is
rapidly advancing to a correct understanding of all this. Each should,
properly, by attending to and doing its own work, help the other.
Each is necessary to the other. The morality the State has charge of
is that which, obviously, contributes to the right ordering and
prosperity of the commonwealth generally, and of its members
individually. It is such as can be expounded, and made intelligible to
all and acceptable to many. Much of it too can be enforced on all.
Not, of course, in the old Egyptian fashion, but in a fashion which is
in accord with the conditions of modern societies.
 There can be few things more mistaken and ridiculous than to
urge that the Master of a School, because he is a layman, cannot
teach such morality as the State requires for its own maintenance,
and for the well-being of its members. He is just as capable as the
Minister of Religion, or as any body else, of learning his own proper
work. The point that really needs to be seen clearly is that the proper
work of the State School Master, and of the Minister of Religion, so
differ, as that each is incapable of teaching fully and rightly what
ought to be taught by the other. The Minister of Religion puts himself
quite in a false position, and contradicts the idea of his office, when
he undertakes the work of the State; and the School Master goes out
of his way, and passes beyond the work of the State, when he enters
on the ground of the Minister of Religion. From the time that civil
societies existed, or that men had come to act from a sense of duty,
all well disposed Fathers of families, not excluding Masters of
Schools, have deemed themselves qualified to teach, and have
taught, with more or less success, to their children such ethics as
they themselves had attained to a knowledge of, and thought
desirable. Let any one refer to the duties I just now enumerated, as
socially and politically necessary in these days; and, when he has
considered what they are, will he be disposed to assert that a man of
ordinary intelligence, the business of whose life it is to teach, whose
attention has been particularly directed to this subject, and who has
studied it with the knowledge that he must teach it, will, after all, be
unable to teach it? Or would any teacher, with that list in his hand,
say that it never would be in his power to give lessons on each of the
heads it contains; and to see that the practice of the pupils
corresponded with what he taught? If the Clergy could do this, why
not the Masters of Schools? The fact, however, is that the Clergy
cannot, and that the Masters of Schools can.
Nothing else that is taught in Schools can be taught so naturally,
so easily, and so surely. Almost everything that occurs, or that is
done, supplies ground for a lesson on the subject. In nothing else
that we have to teach do we find a foundation laid for our teaching
already, as it is here, in the instinctive moral sentiments which have,
some how or other, come to be, or, if not, which may be made to be,
a part of the pupil’s nature. The discipline, too, of life here again aids
the teacher in a manner, which is not the case in anything else he
has to teach. The Ethics the State requires may be taught, as the
occasion in any, and each, case will suggest to the teacher, either
practically, or dogmatically, or scientifically; either with a reference at
the moment to the principle of utility, or to the voice of conscience, or
to experience. Lessons of this kind may also be set forth in Parables,
or illustrative stories: a large proportion of the reading lessons now
used in Schools have this aim. Nor would there be many who would
object to reference being made, in the teaching of the State School-
Master, to the Religious ground, that is to say, to the future life:
though of course it is manifest that this would belong rather to the
teaching of the Church and of the Minister of Religion. Practically,
however, that is with respect to the substance and form of the virtues
taught, there would be no antagonism between the two: for even with
respect to Charity, which Religion elevates above Justice, the
layman would still have something to say in the same sense, for he
would show that the kindliness, and consideration for others, he
taught supplemented and went beyond Justice. Indeed, what
antagonism could there be, seeing that our ideas of the several
virtues, wherever they differ from what Aristotle or Cicero would have
taught, are what our Religion has made them to all of us alike? The
chief difference, indeed, I can make out would be a very small one,
for it would be the importance the lay-teacher would have to assign
to industry and thrift, secondary virtues of which popular Religion
does not take much notice: an oversight which, of course, arises out
of popular misapprehensions, such, for instance, as those we are all
familiar with in respect of the purpose and character of the present
life, of the meaning of faith, and of the teaching of Jesus Christ on
the subject of Divine interposition in the current affairs of life.
But, however, this little difference, though indeed it happens to be
one that must ultimately disappear, for it arises out of a
misconception, will help us to understand the difference between the
morality the State requires and that which the Church presents to us.
The former is limited to what is useful politically and socially, and for
mundane purposes; while that of which the Church has charge
(there being ultimately no real contradiction between the two)
consists of the same principles, only purified, elevated, and rendered
more fruitful by the action of higher motives. It is that which is in
thought perfect; the morality of the kingdom of God, that is of those
who have been brought to understand that they have a citizenship
which is not of this world, and whose conversation is above. It is that
morality which is cast in the mould of the ideas we endeavour to
form of the moral attributes of the Deity; or rather the application of
that to our own present condition: its members endeavour to form
God within themselves. This cannot be enforced. The idea of
constraint contradicts its nature. Its motives are found in men’s
spontaneously engendered conceptions of moral perfection; and in
the hope of a future life, which alone can supply a stage and
conditions suitable for the complete realization of such conceptions.
The rights of the Church are those of humanity to complete freedom
in its effort to advance and purify its ideal of the moral and spiritual
life. This has been its work from the beginning, though in the early
stages of society it embraced the State, and has subsequently often,
during the struggles of the State to establish its independence, been
in conflict with it: sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes
both having been in the wrong: all this History explains. Its true
position is to be in advance of the State. It elaborates and diffuses
that interpretation of man’s nature, and position, and of the
knowledge man has attained to, those conceptions of virtue and that
morality which the State, following in the wake of the Church, adopts
in its own degree and fashion, and makes in such degree and
fashion the aims and principles of its legislation. Every virtue,
however elementary and indispensable, according to our ideas,
might once have been beyond the power and the ken of the State.
We can imagine such a condition of things, as that, during its
continuance the State would have been unable to enforce and
inculcate the principles of common honesty, and even of
responsibility. It may once have been so here, just as it is still, to this
day, in Dahomey. Scientifically, the condition of Dahomey is as much
a part of the subject as the condition of England. The question is,
what has brought about the difference? The answer is the Church—
the Church that was in Egypt, that was in Israel, that was in Greece,
that was in Rome, that was in the forests of Germany, that has been,
and is, amongst ourselves. The Church has, all along, been going
before and shaping, little by little and step by step, higher and clearer
conceptions of right, and of duty, and of life; and the State has
followed, little by little and step by step, accepting and adopting what
the Church had made possible for it. Its position has generally been,
and ex rerum naturâ it must be so, behind the Church. This is seen
distinctly in the early days of Christianity. The Church was then
working out, and diffusing, much that the State afterwards
recognized and acted upon. This is their true relation to each other. It
is not merely that the nation, organized for its immediate mundane
wants, is the State, and that humanity, organized for the needs of its
higher life, is the Church; but that, besides this, in the progress of
society and of humanity, each is indispensable to the other.
Universal History tells us this: and from universal History, in a matter
of this kind, there is no appeal. And what universal History tells us
the History, as far as it goes, of the two famous buildings before us
confirms.
And now we must take off our thoughts from the two great
organizations of society, whose action and interaction have all along
been at work in shaping our political, social, and moral growth, and
making us what we are, symbols of which, in the two buildings
before us, we have been looking upon, and must turn our thoughts to
the great million-peopled city itself, of the existence of which we are
reminded, at the spot where we have taken our stand, chiefly by a
few lordly mansions, glimpses of which we catch, here and there,
through the trees. What variety of life is stirring within its widely
differing regions! How much energy and power, and how much
waste of power, and neglect of opportunity, are there! What
principles are struggling into existence! What principles are dying
out! What a conflict of principles is going on! We shall think not only
of the lordly mansions environing the parks that are spread out
before us, but equally of the commercial city on the banks of the
river, and of the moiling and toiling, the rough and gin-drinking
myriads of the manufacturing quarters of this world-capital. We shall,
in our thoughts, set by the side of what is refined, and intellectual,
and energetic, what is frivolous and enfeebled, what is rough, and
degraded, and vicious. We shall become sensible of the
uncertainties, as well as of the power, of the great intellectual and
moral organism that is at work all around us.
How much is there that is good and hopeful in all classes, and how
much in all that is evil, and evil enough almost to cause
despondency! How vast and complex is the whole! Your thought
enables you to understand that the railway and the telegraph have
made the city in which you are standing the centre of English
business and life, in a manner that was impossible formerly; and
more than that, for the ocean steamers and electric cables have
made it the centre of the business of the world. How does the
imagination, when stirred by the suggestions of the scene, picture to
itself the fashion in which are peopled the decks and saloons of the
great steamships that are hurrying, outward and homeward, on all
seas and oceans, to carry out the plans that have been originated
and matured here! You think, too, of the countless messages that
are flashing to and fro, beneath those seas and oceans, every
moment, for the same purpose. Here is the heart of the world. The
life-sustaining blood, in the form of human thought, and which carries
along in itself the elements of construction as well as of life, is ever
going forth from this heart, and coming back to it again. How many
tens of thousands of steam-engines, in as many mines and factories,
are throbbing and working to supply the wants, and maintain the
wealth, of this manifold Babylon we have built. Of this wealth we see
an exhibition here every day; for this is the spot for the daily parade
of one of its braveries. How have the corn-fields and meadows of
this island been solicited year by year to yield more and more, and
how widely have Australian and African wildernesses been peopled
with flocks and herds, for the enlargement of this wealth. This has on
its surface only a material aspect. It is true that its first and most
obvious result is to give wealth, and the enjoyment of wealth; and
that neither of these are necessarily and in themselves good: for if
wealth lead only to the self-bounded fruition of wealth it is
deadening, corrupting, and degrading: and of this there is in the city
around you much. But, however, this is not all its effect. It has given
to many minds culture and leisure, which they have devoted to
advancing the intellectual wealth of man; and it has produced many
who have devoted themselves, according to the light that was within
them, and prompted by the noblest impulses of our nature, to the
improvement of the moral condition of those with whom they come in
contact. Which of the two preponderate, the good or the bad effect of
the sum of all that is going on, we need not attempt to estimate here.
But to whichever side the balance may incline at the present
moment, we believe that the bad will perish, as it has done in past
times, and that the good only will survive—for only what is good and
true is eternal.
And now we turn from the many who are wealthy to the greater
many who are poor, and are carrying on a painful struggle for bare
existence, in this vast assemblage of humanity: and here, too, we
find mingled with what there is of good much that is evil. Here, as
with the wealthy, are aims that are unwise, springing from misleading
instincts which society has, carelessly and ignorantly, allowed to be
formed in its bosom, and which tend in the individual to unhappiness
and degradation, and in society itself to disorder and subversion.
All this must be taken in by the mind in order that the scene before
us may be rightly understood. We could not interpret the scenes of
old Egypt till we had formed some conception of what old Egypt was,
and we must endeavour to do the same for our corresponding
English scene. It is in this way only that the study and understanding
of old Egypt can be of any use to us. It is only when we understand
both that we are in a position to ask the question whether old Egypt
has anything to teach us.
It tells us that the aims of society must be moral; and that the
morality required can, within certain limits, be created and shaped,
and made instinctive, where society itself honestly wishes and
intelligently endeavours to do it. But as we look upon old Egypt we
see that the morality we need is not precisely what they imagined
and established, and that we are precluded from attempting to
establish what we want in the fashion of old Egypt. Theirs was a
system of constraint, ours must be a system of freedom. Theirs was
a system that concentrated its highest advantages on a few, ours
must be a system that opens its advantages to all. We must present
what we have to offer in such a form that men will voluntarily accept
it for themselves and for their children, and allow it to shape them. If
we see distinctly what we have to do, and the conditions under which
we have to do it, this will be in itself the achievement of half our
work. Their method was to devise a system, in strict conformity to
the conditions of the problem as it then stood, and place it as a yoke
upon society. They could do that: we cannot. Our method must be
accepted freely by society, and by the individual. We, too, must
devise a system in strict conformity to the conditions of the problem
as it now stands; and it must be such as approves itself to the
understanding and the conscience of the men of these times. The
successful fulfilment of the first requirement will, probably, include
the second.
Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, each did the work that had been
allotted to it. What we have to do is not to repeat what any one of
them did. That, indeed, we could not do; and, if we could, it would be
of no use to us. Imitations at all times, but more particularly when
circumstances differ, are worthless and disorganizing. And yet what
each of them did was necessary for us. The work we have to do now
is a great advance upon theirs, and is to be done under very different
conditions from theirs, but is so connected with theirs that we cannot
dispense with their foundations, or with the principles they worked
with. We need them all, but we must use them in the way our work
requires. When men came to build with stone, they did not abandon
all the principles of construction they had worked out for themselves
during the time they had built with wood. Those principles were right
as far as they went. They were not all bad, and worthless, and
inapplicable to the new material and its grander possibilities. What
had to be done was to incorporate the new principles that were
needed with those from among the old that would still be
serviceable. The purpose and object of building, whatever the
materials might be, continued one and the same. And so, now that
we have come to use glass and iron largely in architecture, the same
process is again repeated. Some new principles may be introduced,
but we do not discard all the old ones. Just so is it with the social
fabric.
The great and governing differences in our case are that what we
have to do is to be done for all, and that this is accompanied with the
condition of not partial, but universal freedom. It never was so with
any of the old peoples. And though our work is new in some of its
conditions, and such as, in its reach and variety, was never dreamt
of by the four great teacher nations of antiquity, there is no more
reason for our failing in it than there was for their failing in theirs.
That it is to be done is, in some sort, proof that it may be done.
Indeed, there is apparently more reason for our success than there
was for theirs. We have their experience; and in the principles of
universal freedom, and universal justice, we have more to commend
what ought to be done now to men’s hearts and understandings then
they had. Freedom, knowledge, truth, justice, goodness; these must
be our aims, our means, our statecraft, our religion. We do not go off
the old tracks. They all converge into our path. And so we find that
we are advancing, having history for guide, through new conditions,
into a richer and better life, placed within the reach of an ever
increasing proportion of the community.
The greatest, perhaps, of the advantages that will be found in our
wealth is that it will enable us to confer on every member of the
community such knowledge and such training as shall have an
hopeful, perhaps a preponderant, tendency towards making
instinctive, at all events in the minds of the greater number, a rational
use of the freedom they already possess, and the love and practice
of truth, justice, and goodness. Though, indeed, when we look at the
educational efforts of Saxony, of Switzerland, and of New England,
we are almost brought to fear that this great and necessary work will
be undertaken more readily and intelligently, and done sooner and
better, among people, who have less of the material means for
carrying it out than ourselves. In saying this, I do not at all mean that
we should confine our efforts merely to what they have done, for
they have, to a great extent, omitted that morality which I consider
the main point of all; but that we should be much better than we are,
if we had done as much as they, with their very inferior means, have
already accomplished.
In Egypt submission and order; in Israel, though labouring under
most cruel disadvantage, during its better days belief in and devotion
to right, and during its latter days the determination to maintain at
any cost its morality and religion; at Athens the appreciation of
intellectual culture; in the Roman Empire, by the mere working of its
system, the idea of the supremacy of the law, and the sentiment of
the brotherhood of mankind—were made instinctive. Why should we
despair of doing as much for what we need? Our task, indeed,
though so much grander, and promising so much more fruit than
theirs, does not appear as hard as theirs. If it be beyond our powers,
then modern society is but a fermenting mass of disorder and
corruption. It cannot be so, however; for if it were, then the long
course of History would now have to be reversed. All the progress of
the Past, and all its hard-won achievements, would prove without
purpose; and there would remain for us only to despair of truth, of
right, of religion, and of humanity itself.
 FOOTNOTES
[1] This was written in 1871. It was in the following year, that is,
in the interval between the first and the second edition of this
work, that the Livingstone-search Commissioner of the ‘New York
Herald’ found the great African explorer.
[2] Some, I am aware, are disposed to answer the question of
this Chapter by ascribing to the Egyptians a Turanian origin. The
following appear to be the steps in the process, by which they
endeavour to reach this conclusion. There was, in remote times,
on the banks of the Euphrates, a Priest Class, which, on the
supposition that in its sacred and literary language, there are
some traces of the early Turanian form of speech, might have had
a Turanian origin. (Though, indeed, a Priest Class is rather an
eastern Aryan, or even a Semitic, than a Turanian phenomenon.)
This Priest Class, thus conceivably Turanian, might, conceivably,
have had some ethnological connexion with the Priest Caste of
Egypt. (There is, however, nothing to lead us to suppose that its
antiquity was as great as that of the Priest Caste of Egypt.)
Therefore the Egyptians might have had a Turanian origin. To put
the argument abstractedly: We may imagine two presumable
possibilities; the first of which possesses little probability, and the
second still less; and then by the juxta-position of the two reach a
desired conclusion. In other words, some degree of probability will
be the product of the multiplication of the non-probability of a first
assumption by the improbability of a second. This is the form of
argument by which probability is inferred from the accumulation of
improbabilities.
Of course, there is no saying what discoveries the future may
have in store; but, in the present state of knowledge, it seems an
unlikely supposition that Arts, Science, Law, Philosophy and
Religion were, aboriginally, Turanian.
[3] It is a curious fact that the inhabitants of the Lake-villages of
Switzerland cultivated, in the prehistoric period, as may be seen
in the Zurich collection of objects from the sites of these villages,
the same variety of wheat—that which we call Mummy, or hen-
and-chickens wheat—as the old Egyptians. Did the first
immigrants into Europe, of whom we may suppose that we have
some historical traces, for the Etruscans may have been, and the
Laps, Finns, and Basques may still be, surviving fragments of
their settlements, bring with them this variety of wheat at the
same time that another swarm from the same Central Asian hive
were taking it with them to the Valley of the Nile.
[4] I am led to propound this conjecture from a desire to render
intelligible what Herodotus says of their hair and skin; for we
know, both from the old paintings and from the existing mummies,
that the true Egyptian’s skin was not black, and that there was no
kink in his hair. It is impossible then to take his statement as it
stands; and I can imagine no other way of correcting it.
The difficulty here I conceive to be of just the reverse kind to
that which meets us in his statement, that the circumference of
Lake Mœris was 450 miles; and which, therefore, in the chapter
on the Faioum, I endeavoured to render intelligible by just the
reverse process, that is to say, by suggesting that, while we
suppose he is speaking of the Lake only, he is really speaking of
the whole of a vast system of artificial irrigation, of which the lake
was the main part. Here he is speaking of a part of the Egyptian
population, only he puts what he says in such a way that we
suppose that he is speaking of the whole of it.
I will take the opportunity of this note to propound an
explanation of Homer’s having sent Jupiter, and all the gods, to
Oceanus, to feast, for twelve days, with the irreproachable
Ethiopians. We immediately ask, Why with the Ethiopians? Why
are they irreproachable? What have they got to do with Oceanus?
Why to feast? Why for so long a period? Why all the gods? The
light, in which things are viewed in this book enables us to see an
answer to each of these questions.
Homer, we know, was acquainted with the magnificence of
Thebes. In his time, and for many centuries before, the
Phœnicians had, through commercial intercourse, been closely
connected with the Greeks; having, during the whole of that time,
been an autonomous dependency, or dependent ally, of the
Egyptians, who, in going to and from their head-quarters on the
Euphrates, had kept open a line of communication through
Phœnicia. The Phœnicians, therefore, must have had a great
deal to tell the Greeks about the marvellous greatness of Egypt,
the chief ingredient in which was the magnificence of Thebes.
There was plenty of time for all this to be thoroughly talked over.
Sethos and Rameses, the great Theban builders, had preceded
Homer’s day by four or five centuries. And, as such things never
lose in telling, Homer’s contemporaries must have had no very
inadequate—we now know that they could hardly have had
exaggerated—conceptions of the temples and wealth of Thebes.
He mentions the great amount of its military population; its
hundred gates, which, as no traces of walls of fortification for the
city have been found, meant, probably, the propylons of the
temples; and its vast wealth. He knew probably that Egypt
consisted of an Upper and of a Lower Egypt, and that the
inhabitants of the Upper country were darker, and that in the
extreme south, as then understood, the complexion became quite
black; and so, to distinguish them from the maritime Egyptians, he
calls them Ethiopians. He uses the same word as an epithet of
dark objects, as of wine and bronze. And here among these
Ethiopians was the wondrous Thebes. When the Phœnicians had
told the inquisitive Greeks of its mighty temples, and of its
incalculable wealth, they must have described its commerce, the
source, to a very considerable extent, of its greatness. For
centuries it had been the emporium of the trade of India, Arabia,
and Africa. This, and its position in the supposed extreme south,
to Homer’s mind, connected it with the outer, world-surrounding
ocean. What was told to him, and to his contemporaries, of the
tides and monsoons of the Indian Ocean, suggested to them, and
most aptly, only the idea of a stream. They heard of tides on the
Atlantic also; hence his mighty stream of circum-ambient ocean.
As to the trade of Thebes, all international wholesale trade in
those times, and in that part of the world, was carried on in the
courts and sacred enclosures of temples. The greatness of the
temples was, in some measure, an indication of the greatness of
the trade. The great festivals were, in substance, only great fairs.
Trade was then under the guardianship of Religion. Society was
not yet sufficiently organized for the protection of trade: for such a
purpose the civil power could hardly as yet be said to exist.
Religion alone had either the wisdom, or the power, to enforce fair
dealing, or to ward off violence. At the season, therefore, that the
great annual caravans arrived from the interior, and the easterly
monsoons wafted the merchandise and products of Arabia and
India to Egypt, to be bartered for those of Africa (and the
caravans were doubtless so arranged as that their arrival
synchronized with that of the ocean-borne traffic), there were
great processions and feasts at the temples. Religion then put on
its most imposing aspect. We have now only to recall the number