Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas ( , ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's work focuses on the foundations of epistemology and social theory, the analysis of advanced capitalism and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, albeit within the confines of the natural law tradition, and contemporary politics, particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the phenomenon of modernity, particularly with respect to the discussions of rationalization originally set forth by Max Weber. He has been influenced by American pragmatism, action theory, and poststructuralism.

Biography

Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, Rhine Province, in 1929. He was born with a cleft palate and had corrective surgery twice during childhood. Habermas argues that his speech disability made him think differently about the importance of deep dependence and of communication. He grew up in Gummersbach.

As a young teenager, Habermas was profoundly affected by World War II. Until his graduation from grammar school, Habermas lived in Gummersbach, near Cologne. His father, Ernst Habermas, was executive director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and was described by Habermas as a Nazi sympathizer and, from 1933, a member of the Nazi Party NSDAP. Habermas himself was a ''Jungvolkführer'', a leader of the German Jungvolk, which was a section of the Hitler Youth. He was brought up in a staunchly Protestant milieu, his grandfather being the director of the seminary in Gummersbach. He studied at the universities of Göttingen (1949/50), Zurich (1950/51), and Bonn (1951–54) and earned a doctorate in philosophy from Bonn in 1954 with a dissertation written on the conflict between "the Absolute" and history in Schelling's thought, entitled, ' ("The Absolute and History: On the Schism in Schelling's Thought"). His dissertation committee included Erich Rothacker and Oskar Becker.

From 1956 to 1959, he studied philosophy and sociology under the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno at the University of Frankfurt am Main's Institute for Social Research. Due to a rift between the two over his dissertation—Horkheimer had made unacceptable demands for revision—as well as his own belief that the Frankfurt School had become paralyzed with political skepticism and disdain for modern culture, he finished his habilitation in political science at the University of Marburg under the Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth. His 1961 habilitation work was entitled ' (published in English translation in 1989 as '' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society''). It is a detailed social history of the development of the bourgeois public sphere from its origins in the 18th century salons up to its transformation through the influence of capital-driven mass media. In 1961, he became a '' Privatdozent'' in Marburg, and—in a move that was highly unusual for the German academic scene of that time—he was offered the position of "extraordinary professor" (professor without chair) of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg (at the instigation of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith) in 1962, which he accepted. In this same year, he gained his first serious public attention, in Germany, with the publication of his habilitation. In 1964, strongly supported by Adorno, Habermas returned to Frankfurt to take over Horkheimer's chair in philosophy and sociology. The philosopher Albrecht Wellmer was his assistant in Frankfurt from 1966 to 1970.

He accepted the position of Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg (near Munich) in 1971, and worked there until 1983, two years after the publication of his magnum opus, '' The Theory of Communicative Action''. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.

In 1983, Habermas returned to his chair at Frankfurt and the directorship of the Institute for Social Research. Since retiring from Frankfurt in 1994, Habermas has continued to publish extensively. In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the , which is the highest honour awarded in German research. He also holds the position of "permanent visiting" professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and "Theodor Heuss Professor" at The New School, New York.

Habermas was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in Social Sciences of 2003. Habermas was also the 2004 Kyoto Laureate in the Arts and Philosophy section. He traveled to San Diego and on 5 March 2005, as part of the University of San Diego's Kyoto Symposium, gave a speech entitled ''The Public Role of Religion in Secular Context'', regarding the evolution of separation of church and state from neutrality to intense secularism. He received the 2005 Holberg International Memorial Prize (about €520,000). In 2007, Habermas was listed as the seventh most-cited author in the humanities (including the social sciences) by '' The Times Higher Education Guide'', ahead of Max Weber and behind Erving Goffman. Bibliometric studies demonstrate his continuing influence and increasing relevance.

Jürgen Habermas was the father of Rebekka Habermas (1959–2023), historian of German social and cultural history and professor of modern history at the University of Göttingen.

Teacher and mentor

Habermas was a famed teacher and mentor. Among his most prominent students were the pragmatic philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach (theorist of discourse distinction and rationality), the political sociologist Claus Offe (professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin), the social philosopher Johann Arnason (professor at La Trobe University and chief editor of the journal '' Thesis Eleven''), the social philosopher Hans-Herbert Kögler (Chair of Philosophy at the University of North Florida), the sociological theorist Hans Joas (professor at the University of Erfurt and at the University of Chicago), the theorist of societal evolution Klaus Eder, the social philosopher Axel Honneth, the political theorist David Rasmussen (professor at Boston College and chief editor of the journal '' Philosophy & Social Criticism''), the environmental ethicist Konrad Ott, the anarcho-capitalist philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe (who came to reject much of Habermas's thought), the American philosopher Thomas McCarthy, the co-creator of mindful inquiry in social research Jeremy J. Shapiro, the political philosopher Cristina Lafont (Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University), and the assassinated Serbian prime minister Zoran Đinđić.

Philosophy and social theory

Habermas has constructed a comprehensive framework of philosophy and social theory drawing on a number of intellectual traditions:
* the German philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl and Hans-Georg Gadamer
* the Marxian tradition—both the theory of Karl Marx himself as well as the critical neo-Marxian theory of the Frankfurt School, i.e. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.
* the sociological theories of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead
* the linguistic philosophy and speech act theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Stephen Toulmin and John Searle
* the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg
* the American pragmatist tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey
* the sociological social systems theory of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann
* Neo-Kantian thought

Jürgen Habermas considers his major contribution to be the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition, by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of the cosmos. This social theory advances the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral framework. This framework rests on the argument called universal pragmatics—that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for "purpose")—the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding. Habermas built the framework out of the speech-act philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin and John Searle, the sociological theory of the interactional constitution of mind and self of George Herbert Mead, the theories of moral development of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of his Frankfurt colleague and fellow student Karl-Otto Apel.

Habermas's works resonate within the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason, in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas has stated that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distances himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought, for excessive pessimism, radicalism, and exaggerations.

Within sociology, Habermas's major contribution was the development of a comprehensive theory of societal evolution and modernization focusing on the difference between communicative rationality and rationalization on one hand and strategic/ instrumental rationality and rationalization on the other. This includes a critique from a communicative standpoint of the differentiation-based theory of social systems developed by Niklas Luhmann, a student of Talcott Parsons.

His defence of modernity and civil society