Book Review: Habermas: A Biography, by Stefan Müller-Doohm

• Date: 01 December 2018
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Author: Stephen K. White
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717731107
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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catastrophe, is a sign that the elect are on the verge of the sunlit uplands that
lie beyond politics, and hence that short-term extremist political action is
legitimated accordingly? In warning us of the secular apocalypses that we
face in the twenty-first century, campaigners may draw upon religious depic-
tions of raining hellfire to try and mobilize imaginations. But the apocalypses
we face really are different, because the product of major technological
advancements coupled with knowledge of our resultant possible near futures,
rather than religious faith issuing in rationally unsupported beliefs in impend-
ing catastrophe. And the difference this generates is crucial. The threat from
climate change doesn’t come from too much politics leading to a frenzy of
destabilizing enthusiasm. It comes from too little politics, as our present insti-
tutional structures find themselves thwarted by the scale of the collective
action problems we are currently trapped in.
McQueen hopes that a modern strategy of following Hobbes and
Morgenthau—by emphasising the horror of a coming environmental apoca-
lypse so as to try and prevent that very apocalypse from coming to pass—may
save us yet (199–205). For my money, though, it is clear that such a strategy has
already failed: spelling out the enormity of what we face does not mobilize, but
paralyze. This ultimately leaves us with McQueen’s other “realist” response to
apocalypse: a tragic outlook which becomes “a burdened worldview.” Whilst
this might be “a morally appropriate response to the dangers of the apocalyptic
imaginary” nonetheless “its insistence on a world so resistant to mastery, so
unresponsive to virtuous intentions, so capricious in its reward for goodness
does not offer much consolation” (199). Indeed. But this world was not made
for us, nor we for the world. Why should we expect such consolation to be
forthcoming? McQueen herself, it seems, shares with her principal authors a
vestigial hope that the realist may partake in the optimism of the apocalypticist.
But whether or not one follows her in that, the richness of this book stands
beyond doubt, and deserves all of the attention it will surely garner.
Habermas: Think Again
Habermas: A Biography, by Stefan Müller-Doohm. Translated by Daniel Steuer.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016, 598 pp.
Reviewed by: Stephen K. White, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
DOI: 10.1177/0090591717731107
Jürgen Habermas’s reputation among political theorists is pretty low these
days. He has become a kind of stock player in the theater of contemporary
political theory. We know him as the inventor of the Consensus Machine, a

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device that submits any political dispute to thorough analysis and promises—
if only citizens would let the machine function correctly—to show us what
the just resolution of that dispute looks like. This machine allows us to repro-
duce a perfect university seminar in which rational academics impartially
render judgments above the unruly din of normal politics. Given this portrait
of the German philosopher’s work, it is hardly surprising that English-
speaking political theorists tend no longer to read it, as opposed to reading
about his work in secondary literature that often simply reinforces question-
able interpretations, sometimes with remarkably little concern for actually
citing Habermas. But such carelessness, it might be argued, is not really
harmful: why get compulsive about scholarly niceties, if Habermas’s work
is—as one colleague announced with great gravitas at an APSA meeting a
few years ago—simply “passé”?
One important achievement of Müller-Doohm’s excellent new biography
of Habermas is that it makes it a good deal more difficult for political theo-
rists to continue to blithely purvey this facile image of a passé, ivory tower
thinker who is unrealistic about politics and oblivious to its incessant contes-
tation. Müller-Doohm quite convincingly shows that Habermas has always
taken the role of dogged, disruptive public intellectual as seriously as his
academic one. We often casually portray a scholar as a public intellectual if
he or she occasionally gets involved with public issues. But that description
would not even begin to adequately characterize Habermas. In this regard, he
has indeed become something of a stock character on the public stage, but it
is not the one described above; rather it is one of a tireless combatant in a
broad range of highly contentious issues over the last half century, stretching
from Germany’s Nazi past, to nuclear weapons and waste, to leftist terrorism
of the 1970s (for which some conservative...