142 Habermas: An intellectual biography
to have engaged the work of the French poststructuralist philoso-
phers earlier and more seriously.^28 Later, though, he acknowledged
the promptings of the external context:
Since the middle of the 1970s I have felt the pressure of the neo-
conservative and poststructuralist critiques of reason, to which I
responded with the concept of communicative rationality. This
constellation remained unchanged in the 1980s and it was for this
reason that I continued to work on a critique of the philosophy of
consciousness.... In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity I tried
to show that “representational thinking” can be replaced with
something other than the defeatism of the deconstructionists or
the contextualism of the neo-Aristotelians.^29
The discourse of philosophy enjoys some relative autonomy from
the intellectual field as a whole, but this easily can be overstated in
Habermas’s case:
The concept of a communicative concept of reason... is intended
to lead away from the paradoxes and levelings of a self-referential
critique of reason. On another front, it has to be upheld against
the competing approach of a systems theory that utterly shoves the
problematic of rationality aside.... This double battlefront makes
the rehabilitation of the concept of reason a risky business.^30
Given the persistent interrelation of theory and praxis in his intel-
lectual career, Habermas’s choice of language – “defeatism” and of a
double “battlefront” – is revealing.
After resigning his directorship at Starnberg in 1981, Habermas
considered professorships in Berkeley and Bielefeld before accepting
a chair in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in the sum-
mer of 1983, a position he would hold until his emeritierung there in1994.^31 From 1982 to 1987, Habermas engaged in battle with various
manifestations of the intellectual neoconservatism that he believed
Kohl and his advisors embodied, from the Euromissile debate to a
national debate on the meaning of the Nazi past. In October 1982,
Habermas delivered a lecture to the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the
intellectual affiliate of the SPD, that bore the title, “Neoconservatism
(^28) Ibid.
(^29) Habermas, “Interview with T. H. Nielsen,” Nachholende Revolution, 116.
(^30) Habermas, “The Normative Content of Modernity,” in PDM, 341.
(^31) Wiggershaus, Jürgen Habermas, 112.