This new essay in the Library of Law and Liberty on the work of Professor Jürgen Habermas serves as criticism of all academics who use intentionally impenetrable prose to imply deep meaning when the truth is they are fakes and frauds:
It is true that even at his most opaque, one sometimes glimpses a meaning, or at least a connotation, as one might glimpse a giant panda in a bamboo forest; and it is this dialectic (I surmise) between incomprehensibility and meaning that has given him a reputation for profundity. His thoughts lie too deep for words, at least those that we can grasp at a first or subsequent reading, and the fault lies with us, not with him.
At the risk of being accused of the very fault with which I tax him, I should say that he Habermasizes language. He uses locutions to hide rather than reveal meaning to the educated reader (only the educated could possibly be under the misapprehension that they ought to read him).
Is it any surprise that when Dalrymple translates Habermas for us, the ideas are utterly banal and easily refuted?
Read more on Habermas’ nonsense here
When I was in graduate school (University of Chicago) in the late 1990s, I endured a seminar on Rawls and Habermas. I had to read far more Habermas than anyone should ever have to do. I fully agree with Dalrymple on Habermas! Many of us in that seminar came to the same conclusion, though surprisingly not all. The primary indicator for me that I was more right than wrong in my conclusions came when one of my fellow students–a German national–said that Habermas was clearer and easier to understand in English translation than in the original German.
That is funny, Jlondon. And telling.