Thomas Flynn's work on Sartre and Foucault, the first of a two-volume project, offers a unique opportunity for examining an existential theory of history. It occasions rethinking existential-social categories from the vantage point of the poststructuralist turn. And it contributes to developing existential variants of critical theory. The following questions guide me in each of the three above areas. First, how is human history intelligible, given not only our finite sense of ourselves but also claims that we have reached the (...) end of history? Second, with the poststructuralist eclipse of dialectics, can we render existential categories in social terms and vice versa? Third, critics decry grand theorizing even in fallibilist reason, e.g., of Habermas, while others are worried by the normative deficits of poststructuralist nominalism, e.g., of Foucault. Can existential variants of critical social theory, anticipated before Sartre by Marcuse, split the difference? (shrink)

How a thinker comes to adopt or change a view may be regarded as either a strictly theoretical or biographical issue. First, looking backward at my completed philosophical-political profile of Habermas, I elucidate how biographical methodology can yield a coherent yet dynamically evolving profile rather than a static portrait. Second, examining Habermas’ thinking after 2000, the year my published biography of him ends, I venture a biographical-philosophical hypothesis that in what appears to be Habermas’ turn after 11 September 2001, or (...) in his decisive self-choice, he is faithful to the basic motives and core intuitions that brought him to critical theory. (shrink)