PHIL 758

European Continental Philosophy 2

Please note: this is archived course information from 2016 for PHIL 758.

Description

Habermas and Politics

Jürgen Habermas has come to be viewed as the unofficial philosopher laureate of the European Union. But why have his contributions to contemporary political theory commanded such attention? The course will introduce the sociological and philosophical perspectives that are the essential background to Habermas’s political theory, and then consider his position on some topics in contemporary political theory including: popular sovereignty, the rule of law, constitutionalism, public reason, deliberative politics, the future of the nation state and the lure of technocracy.

A theme of the course will be to critically examine Habermas’s model of the circulation of communicative power in relation to administrative power, with a particular focus on the question of how power is exercised by the people within the public spaces of modern liberal democracies.

Availability 2016

Semester 1

Lecturer(s)

Lecturer(s) Dr Matheson Russell

Reading/Texts

Jürgen Habermas. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Edited by Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998.

It is essential to obtain a copy of this text. Some additional readings will be made available by the lecturer.

Points

PHIL 758: 15 points