Citizen Habermas

Abstract

The Preface to volume XII of Habermas’s Kleine Politische Schriften (“Short Political Writings”) announces that this will be probably (voraussichtlich) the last of the series.¹ Twelve, an even dozen, rounds out the collection of five decades of his interventions in German political and cultural life. It’s true that Habermas is now 85 years old, but a recent search on the Internet found him still active, for example, lecturing at Princeton in early May 2014, and then again in Budapest at the end of that month. Be that as it may, Habermas took the occasion of this 12th volume to reflect on the status of his political interventions—essays and articles in journals, lectures before large publics as well as speeches on receiving prizes (or congratulating their recipients with pointed while elegant laudatios), as well as book reviews and interviews. The first four volumes of the series (I–IV), published in 1980, brought together contributions written already in the 1950s; those published in volume XII date from as recently as 2013. It’s quite a span! The “shortness” of these broad and varied interventions by a philosopher known for his often prolix volumes subtracts nothing from their pertinence.