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Paris Is Closer than Frankfurt: The nth American Exceptionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Kenneth Casebeer
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James Bohman's review (1994) contributes to an important goal for the American legal academy: bringing to us the recent focus on the role of law in society of Jürgen Habermas and, by extension, contemporary Frankfurt School social theory. These comments attempt to locate Habermas broadly in three discursive contexts. My purpose will be to suggestively examine whether and how the American legal reception of Habermasian ideas has been limited—the implicit rationale being that the reception is overdue. With almost all discussion of Habermas and law taking place in Europe, it seems we must ask, Why is there no [German] social theory in America, or at least in American law? After all, the United States became the home in exile for the Frankfurt survivors, and Habermas has been writing influentially in philosophy and political theory for more than 30 years. Yet, for reasons not altogether different from the revision and partial rejection of the other American exceptionalisms (socialism, labor politics, class formations, etc.), perhaps the question in fact should be more about the particularity of American treatment of the role of law in the reproduction of society than about Habermas and his ideas.

Type
On Habermas's Faktizität und Geltung
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , 1994 , pp. 931 - 937
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

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