SELF-DETERMINATION OR SOLIDARITY?

FRANKLIN AND HABERMAS ON CHOOSING ENLIGHTENMENT

Authors

  • John C. Murray

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v18i1.17

Keywords:

humanism, politics, Jürgen Habermas, Benjamin Franklin

Abstract

Rather than use Habermas’s writings as a paradigm for critiquing The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I intend to evaluate and to analyze the dynamic tension that develops between the ideas of pluralism and individualism. I will consider how Franklin defines rationalization and reason and how he continually adapts the definitions to recontextualize individual needs, interests, and values within the emergent general will. I will also suggest the ways in which Habermas’s theoretical language accommodates Franklin’s concept of self-determinism within his own conception of noncoercive consensus.

Author Biography

  • John C. Murray

    John Murray is an assistant professor of English, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and film, as well as critical theory and postmodernism. He is a graduate of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., Harvard University, and University of Rhode Island. Murray has recently published his monograph, Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period: Print Culture, Human Labor, and New Modes of Critique in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt (Cambria Press, 2010). Murray has been published in numerous journals and has presented papers at a number of conferences including “Speech, Media Technologies, and the Diminution of Critique within the Technological Sphere” at The Fifth Annual Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy.

References

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Downloads

Published

2013-10-09

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2010)

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Murray, J. C. (2013). SELF-DETERMINATION OR SOLIDARITY? FRANKLIN AND HABERMAS ON CHOOSING ENLIGHTENMENT. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, 18(1), 17-32. https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v18i1.17