‘Europe’s scandalous greek politics’ within the debate between individualists and communitarians

Abstract

This paper seeks to establish a link between Jürgen Habermas’s published article in June 25th, 2015, at the newspaper Le Monde, called ‘Europe’s scandalous Greek politics’, and his consecrated work, published in 1981, named The Theory of Communicative Action. Therefore, this paper inserts the publication about the European crisis within the contemporary debate between individualists and communitarians, constituting a dialogue among diverse perspectives, present in the works of Hannah Arendt, of liberal philosophers and of communitarians, as Rousseau, Hegel and Marx. Lastly, it is shown that Habermas’s Le Monde article is permeated by his social theory, which establishes a relation between the lifeworld and the subsystems of the economy and politics. Contrary to Arendt’s anti-modernist perspective, and to the conversational restriction proposed by the liberal tradition, which launches limits to human nature, Habermas has it clear that the crisis problem is institutional. Hence, he condemns the political model the European Union has adopted, as he conceives it distinct to the conversational ethics already discussed in his work.