On the philosophy/rhetoric binaries: Or, is Habermasian discourse motivationally impotent?

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 445-472

  Abizadeh, Arash ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

communicative action; constitutional patriotism; discourse ethics; J rgen Habermas; practical reason; rhetoric

Indexed keywords

EID: 51249144792     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453707077017     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. E.g. Anthony Douglas Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
2. E.g. Dominique Schnapper, La Communauté des citoyens: Sur l'idée moderne de nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)
3. David Miller, On Nationality, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
4. Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 227
5. Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), chs 4–5.
6. Cf. Atracta Ingram, ‘Constitutional Patriotism’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 22(6) (1996): 1–18
7. Patchen Markell, ‘Making Affect Safe for Democracy? On “Constitutional Patriotism”’, Political Theory 28(1) (2000): 38–63.
8. Plato, Gorgias, 462b–465c.
9. Cicero, ‘De Inventione’, in De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 6/7.
10. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 58.
11. ‘In Thucydides' History only one Athenian regularly uses oratory effectively, and that is Pericles, who needs it precisely because he wields power through democratic institutions.’ Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff, ‘Introduction’, in Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. xxx.
12. See Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 49 for the link between free political speech and democratic ideology for the ancient Greeks.
13. For the ubiquity of this theme in France and Britain by the 18th century, see Jean Starobinski, ‘Eloquence and Liberty’, Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1977): 195–210
14. Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 30ff.
15. See Neil Saccamano, ‘Rhetoric, Consensus, and the Law in Rousseau's Social Contract’, Modern Language Notes 107(4) (1992): 730–51, who shows why in order ‘effectively to take the place of the public force wielded by an absolute monarch, persuasion must exercise an equivalent force’ (p. 743).
16. See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 49.
17. For Hobbes, see Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 1996), p. 49.
18. for Locke, his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)
19. for Rousseau, see Arash Abizadeh, ‘Banishing the Particular: Rousseau on Rhetoric, Patrie, and the Passions’, Political Theory 29(4) (2001): 556–82.
20. See also Peter France, Rhetoric and Truth in France: Descartes to Diderot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
21. Of great relevance for the transmission of the Roman militaristic imagery to modern thinkers in France is Bernard Lamy's La rhétorique ou l'art de parler, ed. B. Timmermans (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998).
22. Plato, Laws, 690c, 719e–724b.
23. At 722c, Plato now starkly contrasts ‘two means of giving laws, persuasion and violence’. For a full discussion see Yunis, Taming Democracy, ch. 8.
24. Immanuel Kant, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, ed. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 56, 201.
25. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 265 (section 2.3.3).
26. As Rousseau says in Emile, ‘il n'y a que la passion qui nous fasse agir’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, ed. B. Gangebin and M. Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1969), p. 453.
27. Schnapper, Communauté des citoyens, pp. 75–9, 80; emphasis added.
28. David Miller uses similar vocabulary, to similar effect. Contrasting reason to sentiment, he argues that impartialist moral theories, which on his reading fail to give to the nation the independent ethical weight it deserves, are unviable because they rest ‘upon an implausible account of ethical motivation. When I act on moral principle, I am supposed to act simply out of a rational conviction … I am not to be influenced by my sentiments … But it seems unlikely that rational conviction can carry the weight required of it.’ Miller, On Nationality, pp. 57–8; emphasis added. According to Miller, ‘If we look at actual cases in which people identify with their community … we see that they identify with it as a concrete and distinct object’.
29. David Miller, Market, State, and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 231. The nation is indispensable, he argues, because under modern conditions it is the only viable candidate that could serve as the ‘concrete’ object for an affective identity capable of solving the twin problems of motivation and social integration.
30. Maurizio Viroli uses similar rhetoric against constitutional patriotism: ‘contrary to Habermas … civic virtue is not sustained by universalistic political values but by identification with values that are part of the particular culture of a people … [The] political values of democratic citizenship that citizens share are not universalistic constructions of impersonal reason, but are or are perceived and lived as cultural values. They are not attached to an abstract liberty or an abstract justice, but to a way of life informed by those principles. They are attached to a liberty and a justice that is a part of their culture, that has for them a particular beauty, a particular warmth, a particular colour that is connected with particular memories and particular histories.’ Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 174–5; emphasis added.
31. Schnapper, of course, is not oblivious to this point: she herself cites Anderson's phrase and notes that many have accused the nation of being abstract ‘dans la mesure justement où elle est construite par la volonté des hommes, où elle ne se mesure ni ne se perçoit directement’. Schnapper, Communauté des citoyens, p. 104, 106, emphasis added.
32. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 285–6, cf. p. 86
33. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 58
34. Stephen K. White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
35. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 19, 301–4.
36. Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 53.
37. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 87
38. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 19.
39. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 20.
40. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 88–9, 80.
41. Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas' Pragmatics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 22–7 demonstrates that Habermas' ‘parasitic’ language thesis does not provide an argument here.
42. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 102.
43. See, for example, Habermas' reference to Durkheim and Parsons, in Between Facts and Norms, p. 26.
44. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 296, 278, 302.
45. ‘“How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Kant asked himself — and what really is his answer? … “By virtue of a faculty” — he had said, or at least meant. But is that — an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? “By virtue of a faculty,” namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Molière.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), pp. 18–19, # 11. Hobbes and Hume had both made a similar criticism of the scholastics.
46. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, rev. student edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 468
47. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 147–8 (section 1.4.3).
48. Thomas M. Scanlon (What We Owe Each Other [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998]) disputes this, but only by packing everything into his definition of ‘rationality’. The question then could simply be rephrased: How is Scanlonian rationality possible?
49. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 109; emphasis added.
50. See Roland Barthes, ‘L'ancienne rhétorique’, Communications 16 (1970): 172–229.
51. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 19.
52. Iris Marion Young, ‘Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory’, in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 69.
53. E.g. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 207–8.
54. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 302
55. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 5, emphasis added.
56. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 19.
57. Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 10.
58. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 19.
59. For discussion see Kenneth Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls and Habermas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 94ff, 99.
60. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 295.
61. Baynes, Normative Grounds of Social Criticism, pp. 84, 94.
62. Habermas has revised his account slightly in Jürgen Habermas, ‘A Reply’, trans. J. Gaines and D. L. Jones, in Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 239ff.
63. Baynes, Normative Grounds of Social Criticism, p. 84, 94.
64. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 15–16, 21–4.
65. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 27.
66. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 27–30, 8.
67. This worry is on full display in Habermas' response to Horkheimer's and Adorno's insinuation that the ‘modern, fully rationalized world is only seemingly disenchanted’, that the dream of an ‘Enlightenment [which] contradicts myth and thereby escapes its violence’ is self-defeating, and that ‘this process of gaining mastery over mythic forces … [calls] forth, in fateful fashion, the return of myth at each new stage’. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 110, 107, 109.
68. Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 57.
69. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 121; 178, 207, 180, emphasis added; cf. pp. 178–80, emphasis added.
70. E.g. Aglasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
71. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1355b10–12, 1356a1–20.
72. For an extensive discussion of rhetoric as an art in Aristotle, see Eugene Garver, Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 1, especially pp. 28–33.
73. This broadening is, arguably, what recent accounts of rhetoric have attempted to do. See, in particular, Hans Blumenburg, ‘An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric’, in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 429–58
74. William Rehg, ‘Reason and Rhetoric in Habermas' Theory of Argumentation’, in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, ed. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)
75. Arash Abizadeh, ‘The Passions of the Wise: Phronêsis, Rhetoric and Aristotle's Passionate Practical Deliberation’, The Review of Metaphysics 56(2) (2002): 267–96.