Hegel, Habermas, and the Discourse of Modernity

Abstract

This paper examines the central place of G.W.F. Hegel in Jürgen Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, a work that has had a lasting impact on debates concerning the fate of the modern project. Against the backdrop of disputes surrounding modernity and its critics, Habermas presents Hegel as the first philosopher to grasp modernity as a distinct philosophical problem, while also treating his system as an unsuccessful attempt to overcome the contradictions of subject-centered reason. This paper reconstructs Habermas’s interpretation of Hegel’s account of modernity, analyzes the two main lines of his critique, and then offers a critical response. It argues that Habermas’s reading does not fully capture several central features of Hegel’s philosophy, especially the concept of Geist, and that the model of communicative rationality, while intended as an alternative to subject-centered reason, does not entirely avoid the difficulties it is meant to address.