Reddit reviews The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

I understand the universalizing of interests to mean that citizens should look beyond the "national interest" to create the European-wide public sphere that is necessary for a democracy that is not tied to the confines of individual nation-states.

As for whose interests those are, it should be of those citizens who must formulate in public discourse their substantive critiques and objectives.

Now, I do not know as much about his position regarding modernity. Ronald Beiner's Political Philosophy goes into how Habermas defends modernity and how it is most pronounced in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, and ultimately how it is an imperfect formulation (as with the other major theorists surveyed in the book).

So I cannot really comment on his views on that at this time, but this makes me want to more thoroughly read that section.

By original intentions I referred more to the concrete formulation of the EU constitution and how it failed in the referendum. Surely the roots of the Union are more in the Cold War-onward economic policies of Western Europe, with the political union as an afterthought by the elites.

Most of the political elite desire the existing constitutional states as methods to consolidate power. But the pace of economic adversity that affects the citizens, combined with the nation-state's increasing impotence to alleviate it, will create an impasse.

Economic globalization will force nation-states to choose *between constitutional institutions at the supranational level in order to have coherent political and economic policy with functioning democracy; or the multi-national corporation model, with individual nation-states utterly incapable of holding corporate entities accountable while they employ or economically affect a significant number of the human race.

Miguel de Unamuno "Tragic Sense of Life"

Paulo Freire "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

John Ruskin "Unto This Last"

William Morris "News From Nowhere"

Marge Piercy "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Aristotle "Nicomachean Ethics"

Tommaso Campanella "City of the Sun" / Michel de Montaigne "Of Cannibals"

Habermas "Philosophical Discourse of Modernity"

Soren Kierkegaard "Either/Or"

Kafka "The Castle"

Lewis Carroll "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There"

Of each, I would do as the King says: start at the beginning, and go on until you reach the end: then stop.

This might only be peripherally relevant, but Habermas devotes a lot of space in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity to discussing Nietzsche's project - and he's pretty sceptic. Habermas is obviously highly normative, criticizing Nietzsche with his own agenda in mente, so take him for what he is - but his analysis and insights are nevertheless pretty good, and extremely thorough. If you can disentangle his criticisms from his normative scope, I think Habermas' position could yield a good few critical points on Nietzsche's own critiques and project.