Recognizing the shortcomings of Kant’s monological subject and incorporat­ing both Hegel’s critique of Kant and Marx’s critique of modernity, Habermas offers a discursive theory of ethics predicated upon the intersub — jective constitution of identity, originating in and mediated by communica­tion. It includes a developmental account of rationality and a critical assessment of its institutionalization […]

Perhaps the first question this introduction should answer is why feminists should read Habermas at all. Habermasian theory stands squarely in a tra­dition of Enlightenment-inspired political theory and deontological ethics which many feminists have thoroughly rejected, and the authors antholo­gized here are to some extent rowing against the feminist mainstream. What these essays have in […]

I would like to express appreciation for permission to reprint the following: Seyla Benhabib, “Women and Moral Theory, Revisited,” Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Polity Press, Oxford, 1992). Jean Cohen, “The Historicist Critique,” Civil Society and Political Theory, eds. Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (MIT Press, 1992), pp. 201-254. Marie […]