I wonder whether Habermasian constitutionalism, with its emphasis upon the burden of history, is exactly comparable to the ethics of republicanism as articulated by Arendt, for example. The latter seems to me something rather different from “republicanism” as conventionally understood in English or American thought. It is founded, I think, not upon an account of history, nor even a theory of natural arrangements or the artifices of human nature (as in Enlightenment exchanges), but approximates rather more closely to what the late Judith Shklar called “the liberalism of fear.” Arendt’s is, to coin a phrase, the republicanism of fear. In this way of thinking, the foundation for a modern, democratic politics must be our historical awareness of the consequences of not forging and preserving a modern, democratic polity. What matters, to put it bluntly, is that we understand as well as possible the risks of getting it wrong, rather than devoting ourselves over-enthusiastically to the business of getting it right.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I wonder whether Habermasian constitutionalism, with its emphasis upon the burden of history, is exactly comparable to the ethics of republicanism as articulated by Arendt, for example. The latter seems to me something rather different from “republicanism” as conventionally understood in English or American thought. It is founded, I think, not upon an account of history, nor even a theory of natural arrangements or the artifices of human nature (as in Enlightenment exchanges), but approximates rather more closely to what the late Judith Shklar called “the liberalism of fear.” Arendt’s is, to coin a phrase, the republicanism of fear. In this way of thinking, the foundation for a modern, democratic politics must be our historical awareness of the consequences of not forging and preserving a modern, democratic polity. What matters, to put it bluntly, is that we understand as well as possible the risks of getting it wrong, rather than devoting ourselves over-enthusiastically to the business of getting it right." in the context of "Tony Judt, in Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the twentieth century (2012), Ch. 1. "The Name Remains: Jewish Questioner"" to mean that wisdom is timeless.