I was inspired to write this after reading Carrie’s and Andrew’s fascinating posts on the subject. I knew of Carrie’s engagement with Habermas, but I didn’t realize that others in the field were also steeped in his work. It makes me think we should have a symposium on Habermas (and Bush?) — any takers?

Before going to law school, I also grappled with Habermas while still in graduate school. While I think there are some connections between his work and our field, IMHO Habermas’s starting points are very different from ours. I think the same of deliberative democracy, which I also see as discontinuous from — not just a scaled up version of — our field. I explored some of these ideas here.

Habermas started out quite Hegelian but over time aligned himself much more closely with Kant and ideas of universalism and public reason. I think that was an unfortunate turn — the exact opposite of John Rawls’ trajectory. It moved him further away from many of the ideals we hold dear in the DR community, such as interest-based negotiation, the power of empathy and listening, the Difficult Conversations canon, etc. If Habermas’ core idea of communicative rationality is what speaks to some DR scholars, I submit there are other figures like Hans-Georg Gadamer (who Habermas was in large part responding to when writing TCA), who take this idea more in the direction of mutual understanding rather than rational discourse, and who in this way come much closer to the type of dialogue we envision for interest based negotiation and facilitative mediation.

I’m sure many will disagree with my read of Habermas, which is all the more reason why I think it would be interesting to explore some of these ideas in greater depth.  We might all learn a lot of theory that can help inform and deepen our discourse.