Havel and Habermas on Identity and Revolution
Havel and Habermas on Identity and Revolution

Summary/Abstract: A few months before the November 1989 collapse of "real eXIstIng socialism" in Central and Eastern Europe, Habermas reflected on the revolutionary ideas of 1789. How is one to think within plural and secular modernity about a radical democratic republic? He notes the paradox of post-traditional ethical self-realization and moral self-determination: social revolutions project contents and forms that in a finite way transcend the revolutionary action, but revolution shipwrecks before the project gets off the ground. He proposes that to overcome the "sorrow" and the "melancholy" of projected revolutionary possibility, one must form posttraditional identities in those life-forms which are nurtured by a "permanent and everyday-becoming revolution. “

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