Reddit reviews The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Indeed, Habermas asks why the European left-wing parties have not more aggressively critiqued the utterly inadequate individual nation-state efforts to reduce globalization's economic adversity on the citizens. But to prefer the existing political order I think misses the mark: The Lure of Technocracy (2015) is dedicated to enumerating the plethora of ways in which the EU democratic deficit of its institutions only compounds the impotence of the nation-states.

With regard to the radical left, The Inclusion of the Other (1996) ties in here:

> Radical feminism rightly insists that the appropriate interpretation of needs and criteria be a matter of public debate in the political public sphere. It is here that citizens must clarify the aspects that determine which differences between the experiences and living situations of (specific groups of) men and women are relevant for an equal opportunity to exercise individual liberties.

> The individual rights that are meant to guarantee to women the autonomy to pursue their lives in the private sphere cannot even be adequately formulated unless the affected persons themselves first articulate and justify in public debate those aspects that are relevant to equal or unequal treatment in typical cases. The private autonomy of equally entitled citizens can be secured only insofar as citizens actively exercise their civic autonomy.

The right-wing demagogues have stolen the Left's themes, winning over many of the “oppressed and disadvantaged for the false path of national isolation” by appealing to simplistic references drilled into the citizens by the nation-state: the ethno-national constitutional state par excellence, to be preserved only by the return of competencies to the national level and the protection of a majority culture dominating political discourse (more on this in The Inclusion of the Other).

It is only through substantial use of the discourse ethics paradigm and the wider implications of deliberative democracy that “the left-wing pro-globalisation agenda” can once again be “distinguished from the neoliberal agenda of political abdication to the blackmailing power of the banks and of the unregulated markets:”

> Genuine participation of citizens in the processes of political will-formation, that is, substantive [deliberative] democracy, would bring to consciousness the contradiction between administratively socialized production and the continued private appropriation and use of surplus value …

> The arrangement of formal democratic institutions and procedures permits administrative decisions to be made largely independently of specific motives of the citizens … while the citizenry, in the midst of an objectively political society, enjoy the status of passive citizens with only the right to withhold acclamation. ( Legitimation Crisis, 1973 )