138 Habermas: An intellectual biography
“neoconservatism”; the two were interrelated in complex ways for
Habermas.
In 1981 , Habermas left the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg,
which he had directed for ten years, and spent the next two years
between academic positions. The change in his professional sur-
roundings thus coincided with the breakup of the Social-Liberal
coalition in 1982. When he returned to a position at the University
of Frankfurt in April 1983, Kohl had just won the election. The
first series of lectures Habermas gave in this new professional and
political situation was on the subject of modernity. The lectures
therefore were composed in the wake of the Euromissile crisis,
an intensely political moment in the Bonn Republic’s history with
which Habermas was seriously intellectually engaged.
In September 1980, Habermas received the Adorno Prize of the
city of Frankfurt. His prize lecture, “Modernity and Postmodernity,”
can be read as the opening salvo in a battle with French poststruc-
turalist philosophers, whom he critiqued at greater length in The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, a series of twelve lectures com-
posed in 1983–4.^9 But his lecture on “Modernity and Postmodernity”
faces backward to the battles of the 1970s as much as it anticipates
the conflicts of the mid-1980s: “An emotional current of our times
which has penetrated all aspects of intellectual life has placed on
the agenda theories of post-enlightenment, postmodernity, even
of posthistory,” his lecture began.^10 “What I call ‘the project of
modernity’ comes only into focus when we dispense with the usual
concentration upon art.”^11 His thesis was “I think that instead of
giving up modernity and its project as a lost cause, we should learn
from the mistakes of those extravagant programs which have tried
to negate modernity.”^12 Among these mistaken programs he distin-
guished three: the antimodernism of the young conservatives, the
premodernism of the old conservatives, and the postmodernism of the9 The first four lectures were held at the Collège de France in March of- Cited in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (PDM
hereafter), trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987),
Preface, ixx.
(^10) Habermas, “Modernity and Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22
(Winter 1981), 3.
(^11) Ibid., 8.
(^12) Ibid., 11.