SOURCE: "Agreeing What's Right," in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 9, May 13, 1993, pp. 26-7.

In the review below, Dews detects a change in Habermas's discourse ethics in Faktizität und Geltung, offering a thematic analysis of the philosophical principles addressed in the book.

On 9 November last year, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the philosopher Manfred Frank was invited to give the principal address at the memorial service which is held annually in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. The Paulskirche was the home of the first democratically elected German national assembly, which flourished briefly amidst the revolutions of 1848–9, and, in keeping with this setting, Frank refused to limit himself to a 'retrospective ritual of mourning'. Rather, he used the occasion to consider contemporary events in Germany, in particular the rise of a violently xenophobic right-wing element, whose activities claimed 17 lives in 1992, and the reaction of the established political parties to it...