Abstract
To sum this up from a first-person standpoint: the course on Philosophy and Social Sciences (‘the course’) is what drew me to a vocation of sustaining, within the democracy-theoretic cross-fires of our times, the thesis of liberal justice.
For me, the course is all and simply ‘Prague’. I do not hail from the days of Praxis or Dubrovnik or the Interuniversity Centre. My induction coincided precisely with the course’s migration to Bubenec and the Villa Lanna, in May of 1993. That whole affair, I must report, was for me, at the time, something of a mystery. I had been invited by letter from two professors of whom I then knew nothing, Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen. Their letter prominently flagged the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory, with which I had not ever consciously identified and of whose ideas and outlooks I was pretty much unknowing. Or so I immediately thought (and continued to think for some time after my arrival). But I had picked up some encouragement to go from mutual friends and decided to give it a try.
Well, OK, it was not quite the case that my work had never, up to then, strayed at all into precincts of critical theory. My article ‘Law’s Republic’ (1988) – which I had not conceived as a work in that tradition, but rather as a kind of dialogue between modern egalitarian-liberal theory and a so-called civic-republican ‘revival’ on the American academic scene – had resorted at some critical points to ideas about ‘jurisgenerative politics’ for which I had drawn on Habermasian discourse theory and allied work of Seyla Benhabib. I had cited works by those authors, alongside Arendt’s On Revolution. There is no need to speculate, either, about whether that essay of mine might have come to the attention of people connected with the course and so could have explained my invitation. In December 1989, I had presented the work, in Frankfurt, to Professor Habermas along with others, at sessions instigated by some of Habermas’ law-faculty colleagues as a way of assisting his researches into the great work destined for publication as Faktizität und Geltung. Habermas on that occasion gave a mainly welcoming response to my paper (some traces of which can be read in chapter 6 of F. und G.). No doubt in consequence of that to me unforgettable event, I found myself among the many presenters at sessions held at the Cardozo Law School in New York, in September 1992, with Habermas himself as chief interlocutor, around William Rehg’s translations into English of some of the chapters of F. und G. That brief history, I now can guess, sufficiently explains my receipt of a suggestion to start in with the course.
I did all the same initially feel a fish out of water – uncertain (to put it mildly) about a reception for my liberally inflected sort of work in constitutional theory. The reception to my relief – but also, I confess, somewhat to my surprise – was wonderfully open and friendly, engaged and supportive and critical all at the same time, in the special spirit of ‘Prague’. I think in the years that followed I must have come to be identified there as a designated keeper of the liberal-justice flame within the multi-faceted conversation that critical theory these days (to my eye, anyway) represents. And that fact, in turn, has had its dialectical complement. The society of the course drew me steadily toward a conception of liberal thought as critical – as a project of confrontation and negotiation, at and for our time and place, of the inextricable entanglements of freedom with order, truth with interest, reason with rationalization, and justice with justification. I would like to think that every paper I presented at Prague over a 15-year span spoke for travel along that path.
What is certain, though, is this: be it for the better or be it for the worse, this work could not have come forth but for my entry into the circle of the course – so much of it springs from colloquies (some published in Constellations or Philosophy & Social Criticism, some elsewhere, some not yet or ever) with numerous friends – Arato, Cohen, Benhabib, Alessandro Ferrara, Rainer Forst, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth – whose stimulus and whose ideas I met up with through the channels of the course or largely through them; and also with other friends whom, I am proud to say, I brought into the course, like Edwin Baker, Johan van der Walt and Steven Winter. And all of this, moreover, with prompting and support from the shepherds of our work, our journal-keeper scholars, David Rasmussen at PSC and successions of Constellations editors – and I must mention also Marek Hrubec, through whose good offices a Ferrara–Michelman exchange now circulates in a Czech-language publication.