The Ambiguous Modernism of Seyla Benhabib

Bibliographic Data

ID12923342
AuthorsNicholas G Onuf (0000-0001-7212-8917, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume5
Issue2
Pages125-137
Publication date2009-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of International Political Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1755-0882 • E-ISSN: 1755-1722
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.3366/e1755088209000378
OpenAlexW2103055985
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited8

Seyla Benhabib has displayed a deeply normative concern for the origin, properties, condition and destiny of the modern world in work running from Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986), to Situating the Self (1992), The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996), and Another Cosmopolitanism (2006). I hope to show that Benhabib's view of modernity is ambiguous, and that inconsistencies in her position reach back, through Habermas and Weber, to Kant. I begin with a sketch of Benhabib's sense of what modernity is about, turn then to what I think makes her position ambiguous, and conclude with a discussion of what I think is missing in her treatment of modernity. The gap I identify is strikingly pointed up when she uses the term modernism but does not talk about modernism at all

Aesthetics · Art history · Cosmopolitanism · Epistemology · Modernism (music · Modernity · Norm (philosophy · Normative · Political science · Politics · Sketch · Sociology · Utopia · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Globalization and Cultural Identity · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy

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