The women at Seneca were trying to create a “communal life of non­violence”—an “alternative world.” Another way to put this is that they were trying to create an ideal way of life. This is not a realistic or even desirable goal for society at large. Many if not most citizens would find Seneca communal life […]

The Handbook listed five major requirements which each participant should attempt to fulfill: responsibility, self-discipline, respect, cooperation, and struggle. The requirement of responsibility stated that “participants are responsible for voicing their opinions, participating in the discussion, and actively implementing the agreement.”13 This is an aspect of discourse that is often ignored. When Habermas speaks of […]

An illustration of what I consider to be a successful feminist discursive experiment can be found in the practices and procedures adopted by the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice established at the Seneca Army Depot. The Seneca Peace Camp began its life in the summer of 1983 and was inspired by […]

Simone Chambers At his most ambitious, Habermas claims that the ideal of a consensually steered society is inherent to discourse ethics.1 What would such a society look like? What would it require of citizens? What place does or should consensus have in our pluralistic world? Although not for the most part inspired by Habermas, many […]

To even suggest that there is a feminist conception of solidarity might seem presumptuous. Therefore I will first consider what “feminist solidarity” might mean. Feminism is an unprecedented social, political, economic, and cultural movement in its scope and ambitions. It is not geographical, ethnic, racial, national, class, religious, sexually-oriented, or physiological by identity, and its […]

Explaining the motivation for his inquiry in the introduction to Part I of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas wrote: “The philosophical tradition, insofar as it suggests the possibility of a philosophical worldview, has become questionable. Philosophy can no longer refer to the whole of the world, of nature, of history, of society, in the […]

Habermas uses the concept of consensus to articulate an ideal of socialization and enculturation, an ideal of the just society, and an epistemological theory of justified belief. For Habermas, the coincidence of these various functions in one particular type of social relationship—a rationally grounded consen­sus—is no accident. Defining the ideal consensus as one in which […]

A Basis for Feminist Theory and Practice Jane Braaten The feminist critique of science and reason has figured centrally in the devel­opment of feminist theory in the last twenty years. The principal targets of this critique are the apparent links between traditional conceptions of reason on the one hand, and androcentric theories of autonomy, models […]

Feminists have known for some time that the issue of gender is larger than the question of formal rights to social and political equality and that it extends to the more complex questions of intimacy. That understanding has not always been effectively transmitted because the ideas of private and intimate have generally been run together. […]

As discussed above, Habermas traces the historical roots of the principle of inclusiveness to the bourgeois experience of intimacy. The intimate sphere is also of originary significance for the “public use of reason”: it is the actual site of the “truth” of bourgeois ideology and is crucial to his under­standing of how the public sphere’s […]