Jürgen Habermas, the last European

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http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1242541-juergen-habermas-last-european

Jürgen Habermas is angry. He's really angry. He is nothing short of furious -- because he takes it all personally. He bangs on the table and yells: "Enough already!" He simply has no desire to see Europe consigned to the dustbin of world history.

"I'm speaking here as a citizen," he says. "I would rather be sitting back home at my desk, believe me. But this is too important. Everyone has to understand that we have critical decisions facing us. That's why I'm so involved in this debate. The European project can no longer continue in elite modus." Enough already! Europe is his project. It is the project of his generation.


***snip

"No convictions"

And then he's really angry again: "I condemn the political parties. Our politicians have long been incapable of aspiring to anything whatsoever other than being re-elected. They have no political substance whatsoever, no convictions." It's in the nature of this crisis that philosophy and bar-room politics occasionally find themselves on an equal footing.

Habermas wants to get his message out. That's why he's sitting here. That's why he has just written a book -- a "booklet," as he calls it -- which the respected German weekly Die Zeit promptly compared with Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. But does he have an answer to the question of which road democracy and capitalism should take?