Quote of the Week: Jürgen Habermas
This liberal idea of equality has been repeatedly subjected to criticism. The civic republicanism that had been pushed aside by liberalism first responded by objecting that the ‘freedom of the ancients’ must not be sacrificed on the altar of the ‘freedom of the moderns.’ In fact, classical liberalism threatened to reduce the meaning of equal ethical liberties to a possessive-individualist reading of individual or ‘subjective’ rights misinterpreted in instrumentalist terms. In doing so, it failed to do justice to an important normative intuition that also merits respect under modern social conditions, namely, the requirement of solidarity that unites not only relatives, friends, and neighbors in a private sphere, but also citizens as members of a political community beyond purely legal relations. Individual liberties tailored to the business transactions of private property owners and to the religious conscience and allegiance of private individuals constitute the core of a liberal legal system. This reading pointed to the narrow ‘egoistic’ interpretation of ethical freedom that continued to echo in the polemic of the young Marx against the American and French declarations of rights. The objection that individual freedom is not exhausted by the right to a utilitarian ‘pursuit of happiness’ and hence cannot be reduced to the authorization to the private pursuit of temporal and spiritual goods.
Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion. trans. Ciaran Cronin (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 272-3.
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Henry:
I can think of a lot of directions for thought from this quote. Habermas’ isn’t commenting directly on the elevation of corporations to “individual” status, but this has been a significant factor in tearing down community freedoms and twisting liberty’s meaning. Transnational corporations, with their authoritarian governance, have perverted concepts of “individual” rights for their own purposes, exerting ever-increasing cultural and political influence. Corporations are required by charter to be profit-driven and they frequently adopt short-term goals. Under the onslaught, entire communities (not just religious ones) have given up control of their own cultural destiny.
Earlier in the book, Habermas refers to the asymmetrical burden on religious traditions and religious comm unites: “…religious citizens had to learn to adopt epistemic attitudes toward their secular environment that come more easily to enlightened secular citizens,…” Pitted against corporate power, the asymmetry is overwhelming.
You are right, there are many ways one can go about with this quote. He, of course, points out how this challenge is dealt with in modern political thought. But I wanted to point out here the problem of individualism and how someone else points out the need for solidarity as a response to it (like Catholic thought).