"His previous books “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” and “Between Facts and Norms” were of course somewhat different than the merry post-modern shadowboxing of French philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. What’s more, another of Habermas’ publications, “Theory of Communicative Action,” certainly has its pitfalls when it comes to his theory of “coercion-free discourse” which, even before the invention of Facebook and Twitter, were fairly bold, if not perhaps naïve. Habermas was never a knife thrower like the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek, and he was no juggler like the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk."
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It’s worth noting that Der Spiegel has a circulation in Germany of 1.1 million, which is equivalent to a magazine like Time or Newsweek selling more than 4 million copies a week. And yet it still happily publishes long profiles of Jurgen Habermas, dropping names like Baudrillard and Sloterdijk like you’re meant to know who they are. (Which, you are.)
(via felixsalmon)
