Critical Encounters with Habermass Political and Legal Theory (Paperback)

With over a dozen contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines, this book revisits Jürgen Habermas’s de­fining text on legal and political theory, Between Facts and Norms.

The contributors interrogate the prospects for Habermas’s optimistic defense of liberal democracy in our current age of straining global capitalism and menacing authoritarian populisms. The authors arrive at different conclusions, with some contributors engaging directly with his theory while others assessing it through the prisms of political economy, the media, policing, employment discrimination law, international relations theory, social movements, democratic institutions and the historical context of Between Facts and Norms.

John Abromeit is Professor of History at SUNY, Buffalo State, the author of Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (2011), and the co-editor of several volumes, including: Siegfried Kracauer: Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda and Political Communication (2022).

Matthew Dimick is Professor of Law and Director of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo School of Law, and the author of Ending Income Inequality (2025). His research addresses the law and political economy of income inequality, capitalism and the administrative state, and the historical epistemology of race and employment discrimination law.

Paul Linden-Retek is Associate Professor of Law, University at Buffalo School of Law. He writes and teaches in the areas of constitutional law, international human rights, and critical legal theory, with an emphasis on comparative law, European Union law, and refugee law.