Habermas on Religion and Democracy: Critical Perspectives

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Notes

1. See Habermas’s reflections on populism in “For A Democratic Polarisation.”

2. See Crouch, Post-Democracy; Laclau, On Populist Reason; De Benoist, “The Current Crisis of Democracy”; and Zakaria, “Can America Be Fixed?”

3. Habermas moves from a reconstructive science to a reconstructive approach. See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.

4. Kepel, The Revenge of God.

5. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation.

6. For a good bibliography of Habermas’s work, see http://www.habermasforum.dk/.

7. Some academics even suggest that Habermas’s postsecularism is a passing academic fad, useful merely for getting research grants. See Bader “Post-Secularism or Liberal-Democratic Constitutionalism?”

8. Pollack and Olson, eds., Religion in Modern Societies; Roy, Holy Ignorance; Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular; and Bruce, Secularization.

9. Western Europe remains an exception on a global level in terms of the decreasing number of believers. We should be wary however of “essentializing” its exceptionality. For a sociological analysis of Europe’s position, see Berger, Davie, and Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe?; Pollack, Müller, and Pickel, eds., Social Significance of Religion.

10. For an analysis, see Bottici and Challand, “Rethinking Political Myth.”

11. We do not deny that Habermas’s vision has elements of a “grand narrative,” even if, from the 1980s onwards, he has admitted the growing relevance of historicity and hermeneutics. See Ungureanu and Monti, Contemporary Political Theory and Religion.

12. The term has sometimes been objected to for carrying different meanings (empirical phenomenon, normative ideal, etc.). Like any “post-” term, “postsecularism” may generate more confusion than clarity. But the objection of polysemy does not obtain. First, most concepts in philosophy and the social sciences are polysemic and are used in various and at times confusing ways. Second, polysemy can be an advantage: that for Habermas “postsecularism” carries both an interpretive and a normative meaning is part of its defining features. See infra.

13. Requejo and Ungureanu, eds., Democracy, Law and Religious Pluralism.

14. Habermas, Awareness of What Is Missing, 19.

15. See, for instance, Žižek, Puppet and the Dwarf. Žižek and Badiou rightly emphasize the historical “discontinuity” in criticizing Habermas’s teleology. But from their valid concern to the exaltation of the Event there is a chilling leap of faith.

16. It should be noted that Habermas has gradually abandoned some of the rigidness of Kantian rationalism.

17. For a similar approach, see Sen, The Idea of Justice; for a typology of comparative approaches, see Ungureanu and Monti, Contemporary Political Theory and Religion.

18. For an excellent recent collection on Habermas’s work, see Calhoun, Mendieta, and VanAntwerpen, eds. Habermas and Religion.