The intellectual historian Peter Gordon (Harvard) offers an informative review of the new biography of Habermas.  Among other things, I was struck by the irony that Habermas–always an admirable critic of post-Nazi complacency in Germany, as Gordon emphasizes–secured his habilitation and first academic post thanks to the influence of the disgusting Nazi and lifelong anti-semite Gadamer!  (I wonder if Habermas knew?  For a long time, Gadamer was quite good at keeping it under wraps.)  Gordon, in my view, significantly overstates Habermas's philosophical importance (in contrast to his invaluable role as a public intellectual holding post-War Germany to moral account).  When Marxism returns, as it no doubt will, in something more like Marx's form, Habermas will be remembered mainly as taking the philosophically feeble (and irrelevant) attack on instrumental reason that began with Horkheimer and expanding it to the point that so-called "Critical Theory" collapsed into precisely the kind of bourgeois moral theorizing Marx loathed.  (For anyone interested, I discuss this in a bit more detail here.)