that he abandoned, just as it was in a weak position vis-à-vis him in the
previous conjuncture. We must therefore reconstruct Habermas just as
Habermas sought to reconstruct historical materialism. We must change myths
of origin and first philosophies, without abandoning Habermas’s essential
intuition: that the philosophy of language is of crucial importance for
understanding society as a whole and getting some purchase on events.
Because Habermas is a major philosopher, he is conscious of the changed
conjuncture. In a text published in Le Mondein May 2003, he referred to the
Bush administration, or rather its ideologues, as ‘revolutionaries’, in that they
had revolutionised the conjunctural political set-up which his philosophy
naturalised by basing it on the structure of interlocution. He could only note,
and deplore, the destruction of the international order based on renunciation
of the ‘right to war’ embodied by the UN, as he observed that the ‘negotiations’
conducted by the US administrations (Clinton and Bush equally) before both
the Kosovo war and the second war against Iraq had nothing to do with a
search for consensus and everything to do with the brutal imposition of a
balance of military might. They bore a strange resemblance to the discussions
between the wolf and the lamb in the fable (asymmetric war makes it possible
to impose disarmament on opponents prior to the aggression to which they
will inevitably be subject). What the ‘revolutionaries’ around George W. Bush
had revolutionised was precisely the universalism that founds the ethics of
discussion and the politics of contractual negotiation. While this observation
did not impart the form of a jeremiad in the etymological sense to Habermas’s
text, it did give it a nostalgic, disillusioned tone, with a mixture of lucidity
(on the current conjuncture, which is one of resurgent imperialism) and hope
in the face of the facts (this is not a critique: Marxists adopt precisely the
same position):
In the United States itself, the administration of a perpetual ‘wartime president’
is already undermining the foundations of the rule of law. Quite apart from
the methods of torture that are practiced or tolerated outside nation’s borders,
the wartime regime has not only robbed the prisoners in Guantanamo of the
rights they are entitled to expect according to the Geneva Convention; it has
expanded the powers of law enforcement and security officials to the point
of infringing the constitutional rights of America’s own citizens....
The universal validity claim that commits the West to its ‘basic political
values’, that is, to the procedure of democratic self-determination and the62 • Chapter Three