Habermas on America's "Hopper-Like" Melancholy

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was recently in the US and witnessed the financial crisis here up close.  In an interview in Die Zeit Habermas invokes one of my favorite American painters to describe the mood here:

Über die Bildschirme flimmerte die hoppersche Melancholie der Endlosschleife langer Reihen verlassener Häuschen in Florida und anderswo – mit dem Schild »Foreclosure« im Vorgarten. (A Hopper-like melancholy fickered across the television screens  with a  seemingly endless loop of of long rows of abandoned houses in Florida and elsewhere with "Foreclosure" signs on their front lawn.)

I had no idea that Edward Hopper was so popular in Germany that his name could be used as an adjective in a newspaper without any explanation required.

By the way, the entire interview is worth reading and the folks at Sign and Sight were kind enough to provide a translation in English. Habermas sees the global crisis as another legitimation crisis for capitalism, the logical outcome of neo-liberal principles exacerbated by the disasterous economic and foreign policies of the Bush administration.  The way out of the crisis, in Habermas' view, is through a new supra-national world order that can coordinate a global response.  Ironically, it is America - renewed by a watershed election - that can show the path from the ruined landscape it created:

Do we have any alternative except to bet on this draft horse? The United States will emerge weaker from the current dual crisis. However, it remains for the present the liberal superpower and it finds itself in a situation which encourages it to overhaul its neoconservative self-image as the paternalistic global benefactor. The worldwide export of its own form of life sprang from the false, centralised universalism of the Old Empires. By contrast, modernity rests upon the decentralised universalism of equal respect for everyone. It is in the interest of the United States not only to abandon its counterproductive stance towards the United Nations but to place itself at the head of the reform movement. Viewed historically, the confluence of four factors – superpower status, the oldest democracy in the world, the assumption of office of a ... liberal and visionary president, and a political culture that provides an impressive sounding board for normative impulses – represents an improbable constellation. Today America is deeply distraught by the failure of the unilateral adventure, the self-destruction of neoliberalism and the abuse of its exceptionalist consciousness. Why shouldn't this nation, as it has so often in the past, pull itself together and try to bind the competing major powers of today – the global powers of tomorrow – before it is too late into an international order that no longer needs a superpower? Why shouldn't an American president – buoyed by a watershed election – who finds that his scope for action in the domestic arena is severely constrained want to embrace this reasonable opportunity – this opportunity for reason – at least in foreign policy?

Comments

[Marianna Scheffer]

Thanks for finding this, David. I will read it carefully tomorrow (today is turkey day, and I plan to celebrate and ignore the serious stuff for a change.)
Happy Thanksgiving.

[Marianna Scheffer]

Habermas seems strangely optimistic in this interview. Hmm. Maybe he can work on Obama's team.