Seyla Benhabib
Ethics must see each person in their concrete situation, not just as an abstract equal – and democracies keep renegotiating the rights of outsiders.
Placement
Turkish-American critical theorist: discourse ethics must address the “concrete other”, not only the generalised one; the rights of migrants and refugees are worked out through “democratic iterations”.
Key ideas
- Generalised and concrete other
- The rights of others
- Democratic iterations
Influence
Influenced by 4
Immanuel Kant
influenced by
Benhabib took Kant’s cosmopolitan right of hospitality as the starting point for her account of the rights of migrants and refugees (The Rights of Others, 2004). S. Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (2004); Another Cosmopolitanism (2006); I. Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795)
Evidence: AI draft
Immanuel Kant › 1724–1804
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
influenced by
Benhabib’s Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986) began from Hegel’s critique of Kant and of natural right to reconstruct the normative foundations of critical theory. S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (1986)
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Hannah Arendt
influenced by
Benhabib drew on Arendt’s ‘enlarged mentality’, taken from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, for her interactive universalism (Situating the Self, 1992) and read Arendt as a ‘reluctant modernist’ (1996). S. Benhabib, Situating the Self (1992); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996); H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982)
Evidence: AI draft
Hannah Arendt › 1906–1975
Jürgen Habermas
influenced by ✓
In ‘The Generalized and the Concrete Other’ (1987) Benhabib argued that Habermas’s discourse ethics, which she defended, must also take in the concrete other. S. Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other”, Praxis International 5 (1986), and in S. Benhabib and D. Cornell (eds.), Feminism as Critique (1987); Situating the Self (1992)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Jürgen Habermas › 1929–2026
Criticism
Criticizes 1
Judith Butler
criticised
Benhabib objected that Butler’s performative theory of gender dissolves the subject and thus leaves no room for agency and feminist emancipation (‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, 1991). S. Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance”, Praxis International 11 (1991); repr. in Feminist Contentions (1995), with Butler’s reply “Contingent Foundations”
Evidence: AI draft
Judith Butler › b. 1956
Works
Discourse ethics with the concrete other: gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics.
Aliens, residents and citizens: a cosmopolitan right to membership, worked out through democratic iterations.
Position
Benhabib defends a critical theory in the line of Habermas’s discourse ethics while correcting it from a feminist standpoint. Moral theories from Kant to Rawls and Habermas, she argues, address the “generalised other”, an agent with the same rights as ourselves; justice also requires attending to the “concrete other”, a particular person with a history and needs. Her political work asks how democratic self-government and universal human rights can be reconciled when the people who govern themselves are a bounded community. Her answer is “democratic iterations”: processes in which universal norms are repeatedly interpreted and transformed by citizens through courts, legislatures and public debate, so that the rights of migrants and refugees are expanded from within.
Life & context
Seyla Benhabib (born 1950 in Istanbul) grew up in a Sephardic Jewish family, studied at the American College for Girls in Istanbul and Brandeis and took her doctorate at Yale in 1977. She taught at Harvard and the New School, and from 2001 to 2020 was professor of political science and philosophy at Yale; she is now at Columbia. She has worked closely with the Frankfurt tradition and on Hannah Arendt.
Further main works
- Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986)
- The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996)
Appears in
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