The Debate with Jiirgen Habermas Jean L. Cohen The relation between feminism and the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas is characterized by ambivalence, as the essays collected in this volume witness. On the one hand feminists are critical of Habermas’s peculiar blindness to gender issues, of his one-sided interpretation and assessment of the contem­porary feminist […]

In general, then, the principal blindspots of Habermas’s theory with respect to gender are traceable to his categorical opposition between system and life — world institutions and to the two more elementary oppositions from which it is compounded, the reproduction one and the action-contexts one. Rather, the blindspots are traceable to the way in which […]

Let me turn, then, to Habermas’s account of late welfare state capitalism. I must acknowledge at the outset that its critical potential, unlike the critical potential of his account of classical capitalism, cannot be released simply by reconstructing the unthematized gender subtext. Here, the problematical features of his social-theoretical framework tend to inflect the analysis […]

Thematizing the Gender Subtext The foregoing difficulties notwithstanding, Habermas offers an account of the interinstitutional relations among various spheres of public and private life in classical capitalism which has some genuine critical potential. But in order to realize this potential fully, we need to reconstruct the unthematized gender subtext of his material. Let me return […]

Let me begin by considering two distinctions central to Habermas’s social — theoretical categorical framework. The first of these is the distinction between the symbolic and the material reproduction of societies. On the one hand, claims Habermas, societies must reproduce themselves materially; they must successfully regulate the metabolic exchange of groups of biological individu­als with […]

Nancy Fraser To my mind, no one has yet improved on Marx’s 1843 definition of critical theory as “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.”1 What is so appealing about this definition is its straightforwardly political character. It makes no claim to any special epistemological status, rather it supposes that with respect […]

The last two essays in the anthology focus on the provocative issues of identity and difference which have recently been hotly contested by femi­nist theorists. As feminists grapple with political and theoretical challenges to any easy understanding of the category “women,” questions of what an identity is and how it is constituted have led to […]

The next three essays in the collection, Seyla Benhabib’s, Jodi Dean’s, and mine, reflect attempts to use Habermas’s discourse theory to bridge the gap that arises from significant feminist critiques of deontological ethics, ranging from the issues of the universal and the particular, to criticisms of Habermas’s account of the generalized other, and to discussions […]

The essays by Jane Braaten and Simone Chambers reflect on Habermas’s discourse ethics from the perspective of political praxis, assessing its importance and limitations in light of women’s lives, and with respect to feminist goals and practices. Jane Braaten argues that to a significant extent, Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality converges with the ideals of […]

The Public and the Private The first four articles of this anthology problematize Habermas’s analysis of the public and the private spheres, whose differentiation and structure he argues, are essential to the character of modernity. This distinction between public and private parallels, but is not identical to, the distinction he draws between system and lifeworld. […]