Squeers, so far he makes some sense to me, ill-educated as I am in the finer points of philosophy and forced to rely on my own poor wits to try to compensate. I'd not call myself a conservative though, given that many of the people on OLO seem to disagree with much of what I say on social issues...

It seems undoubtedly true to say that procedurality is becoming an end in itself and that our institutionalised way of doing government means that there is little room for really useful public discourse outside the bounds of the debate set by those institutions. Thus we have politicised media, academia, business, bureaucracies, workers, feminists, etc, etc, etc and the individual or marginalised group has to struggle to be heard.

Anyway, I'll read a bit more of what the man has had to say for himself before I make up my mind.

Antiseptic,
I hope I didn't seem condescending. I consider myself a lightweight in the "thinker" stakes, and formal education has been a novel and not particularly positive experience for me. There is far more (too much) PC disseminated these days, in so-called places of higher education, than good sense, or anything of practical value.
Your posts usually make good sense to me, so whatever your bias is, and we all have them, you 'can't' be a conservative :-)

I would put Habermas on par with Chomsky as one of the great and most prolific thinkers of "twentieth" century. Whatever the formula (if there is one) that breaks humanity's current malaise, Habermas will probably deserve some of the credit.

Squeers, I was trying for self-deprecation because I am genuinely poorly schooled in philosophy, having been more of a hard science/engineering type for most of my life. At 47 I'm not entirely sure that a better choice might not have been a career in the humanities. If I were to try today, it would probably be brief and followed by a long prison term...

@squeers and antiseptic serendipity brought me back to this thread a good book you both might like to look at is Todd Hedrick's Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism and the claims of Political Philosophy. Hedrick prefers Habermas to Rawls but does a good job of critically analyzing both their views. Squeers has already alluded in one of his posts (either here or elsewhere) to Foucault again someone who seems to provide a good analysis of the human condition. Michael Taylor's book: Community, Anarchy and Liberty is now somewhat dated but I think still gives a very good analysis of the sort of world that is possible.

Thanks for the references, John, I'll look them up.

I'm not a huge fan of Foucault as I understand his thoughts, although once again I can't claim any particularly good knowledge of the man's work, merely a skimming over the years. It might be interesting to look more closely at what he had to say.