Background

Jürgen Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, on June 18, 1929. He grew up in nearby Gummersbach, where his father was director of the local seminary.

Education

Habermas grew up in Gummersbach, Germany. At age 10 he joined the Hitler Youth, as did many of his contemporaries, and at age 15, during the last months of World War II, he was sent to the Western Front. After the Nazi defeat in May 1945, he completed his secondary education and attended the Universities of Bonn (1951-1954), Göttingen (1949-1950), and Zürich (1950-1951). At Bonn, he received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1954 with a dissertation on Friedrich Schelling.

Jürgen Habermas completed his second doctorate (his habilitation thesis, which qualified him to teach at the university level) in 1961 under the political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth at the University of Marburg; it was published with additions in 1962 as Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere).

Career

From 1956 to 1959 he worked as Theodor Adorno’s first assistant at the Institute for Social Research. Habermas left the institute in 1959. In 1961 Habermas became a privatdozent (unsalaried professor and lecturer) in Marburg, and in 1962 he was named extraordinary professor (professor without chair) at the University of Heidelberg. He succeeded Max Horkheimer as professor of philosophy and sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt University) in 1964. After 10 years as director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg (1971-1981), he returned to Frankfurt, where he retired in 1994. Thereafter he taught in the United States at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) and New York University and lectured worldwide.

As a prominent voice within West Germany’s postwar "skeptical generation," Habermas participated in the major intellectual debates within the country in the second half of the 20th century and beyond. In 1953 he confronted Martin Heidegger over the latter’s rediscovered Nazi sympathies in a review of Heidegger’s Einführung in die Metaphysik (1953; Introduction to Metaphysics).

Achievements

• With his far-ranging grasp of both theory (epistemology) and practice (ethics and social philosophy), Habermas has developed a theoretical construct of social philosophy that deals with the act of communication and the formation of consensus through debate, thereby creating an image of what human society should and can be. He has had a great influence on society, both as a superb theoretician and as a person who speaks out passionately in accordance with his own philosophy about real social issues.
  
  Habermas was the recipient of numerous honors, including the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1980), the Kyoto Prize (2004), the Erasmus Prize (2013), and the John W. Kluge Prize (2015).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Philosophical Introductions: Five Approaches to Communicative Reason

    (On the occasion of Habermas’s 80th birthday, the German p...)

    2018
  • Postmetaphysical Thinking II

    (The first section of the book deals with the shift in per...)

    2017
  • Knowledge and Human Interests

    (For those concerned with the relationships between though...)

    1972
  • The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

    (This is Jürgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociol...)

    1991
  • Postmetaphysical Thinking: Between Metaphysics and the Critique of Reason

    (In this new collection of recent essays, Habermas takes u...)

    1995
  • The Theory of Communicative Action

    (A major contribution to contemporary social theory. Not o...)

    1985

Politics

In the late 1950s and again in the early 1980s Habermas engaged with European-wide antinuclear movements, and in the 1960s he was one of the leading theorists of the student movement in Germany - though he effectively broke with the radical core of the movement in 1967 when he warned against the possibility of "left fascism." In 1977 he protested against curbs on civil liberties in domestic anti-terrorist legislation, and in 1985-1987 he participated in the so-called "historians’ debate" on the nature and extent of German war guilt by denouncing what he regarded as historical revisionism of Germany’s Nazi past; he also warned of the dangers of German nationalism posed by Germany’s reunification in 1989-1990. Although he endorsed the Persian Gulf War (1991) as necessary to protect Israel and the bombing of Serbia (1999) by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as necessary to prevent the genocide of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, he opposed the Iraq War (2003) as unnecessary and illegal. He also promoted the creation of a constitutional supranational democracy in the European Union, opposed human cloning, and warned against the reaction of religious fundamentalists of all kinds, both within and outside the West, to destructive secularization.

Views

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas showed how modern European salons, cafés, and literary groups contain the resources for democratizing the public sphere. In his 1965 inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University, "Erkenntnis und Interesse" (1965; "Knowledge and Human Interests"), and in the book of the same title published three years later, Habermas set forth the foundations of a normative version of critical social theory, the Marxist social theory developed by Horkheimer, Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt Institute from the 1920s onward. He did this on the basis of a general theory of human interests, according to which different areas of human knowledge and inquiry - e.g., the physical, biological, and social sciences - are expressions of distinct, but equally basic, human interests. These basic interests are in turn unified by reason’s overarching pursuit of its own freedom, which is expressed in scholarly disciplines that are critical of unfree modes of social life. In his rethinking of the foundations of early critical social theory, Habermas sought to unite the philosophical traditions of Karl Marx and German idealism with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the pragmatism of the American logician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Habermas took a linguistic-communicative turn in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981; The Theory of Communicative Action). Drawing on the work of analytic (Anglo-American) philosophers (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin), Continental philosophers (Horkheimer, Adorno, Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alfred Schutz, and György Lukács), pragmatists (Peirce and G.H. Mead), and sociologists (Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and Niklas Luhmann), he argued that human interaction in one of its fundamental forms is "communicative" rather than "strategic" in nature, insofar as it is aimed at mutual understanding and agreement rather than at the achievement of the self-interested goals of individuals. Such understanding and agreement, however, are possible only to the extent that the communicative interaction in which individuals take part resists all forms of nonrational coercion. The notion of an "ideal communication community" functions as a guide that can be formally applied both to regulate and to critique concrete speech situations. Using this regulative and critical ideal, individuals would be able to raise, accept, or reject each other’s claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity solely on the basis of the "unforced force" of the better argument - i.e., on the basis of reason and evidence - and all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain mutual understanding. Although the ideal communication community is never perfectly realized (which is why Habermas appeals to it as a regulative or critical ideal rather than as a concrete historical community), the projected horizon of unconstrained communicative action within it can serve as a model of free and open public discussion within liberal-democratic societies. Likewise, this type of regulative and critical ideal can serve as a justification of deliberative liberal-democratic political institutions, because it is only within such institutions that unconstrained communicative action is possible.

Liberal democracy is not a guarantee that communicative rationality will flourish, however. Indeed, in modern capitalist societies, social institutions that ideally should be communicative in character - e.g., family, politics, and education - have come to embody a merely "strategic" rationality, according to Habermas. Such institutions are increasingly overrun by economic and bureaucratic forces that are guided not by an ideal of mutual understanding but rather by principles of administrative power and economic efficiency.

Habermas’s findings carried wide-ranging normative implications. In Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (1983; Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action), he elaborated a general theory of "discourse ethics," or "communicative ethics," which concerns the ethical presuppositions of ideal communication that would have to be invoked in an ideal communication community. In a series of lectures published as Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Habermas defended from postmodern criticism the Enlightenment ideal of normative rationality and specifically the idea that unconstrained communication is guided by reasons that can be rejected or redeemed by speakers and hearers as true, right, or sincere.

Habermas was criticized by both the postmodern left and the neoconservative right for his trust in the power of rational discussion to resolve major domestic and international conflicts. While some critics found his normative critical theory - as applied to areas such as education, morality, and law - to be dangerously Eurocentric, others decried its utopian, radically democratic, or left-liberal character. He was criticized by Marxists and by feminist and race theorists for abandoning socialism or for allegedly giving up on vigorous criticism of social injustice and oppression. For some representatives of antiglobalization social movements, even Habermas’s left-leaning political liberalism and deliberative democratic reformism were inadequate to address the cultural, political, and economic distortions evident in existing democratic institutions. Habermas responded to critics at both ends of the political spectrum by developing a more robust communicative theory of democracy, law, and constitutions in Faktizität und Geltung (1992; Between Facts and Norms), Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (1996; The Inclusion of the Other), and Die postnationale Konstellation (1998; The Postnational Constitution). In Zeit der Ubergänge (2001; Time of Transitions), he offered global democratic alternatives to wars that employ terrorism as well as to the "war on terrorism."

Among Habermas’s, most lasting preoccupations were existential questions of religion, rationality, and "postsecular constellations," a term that refers to the continued coexistence in the present age of secular and religious, cosmopolitan and ethnic, and Enlightenment and traditional worldviews. From the postwar years onward, Habermas engaged with a variety of thinkers who were preoccupied with the theme of hope against hope: existentialists such as Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre, Christian political theologians such as Johann Baptist Metz and Jürgen Moltmann, and Jewish thinkers Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Habermas returned to such issues in the early 21st century in Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur (2001; The Future of Human Nature), Glauben und Wissen (2001; Faith and Knowledge), Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity (2002), and other works.

Quotations: "Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems."

"What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation."

"Today's Islamic fundamentalism is also a cover for political motifs. We should not overlook the political motifs we encounter in forms of religious fanaticism."

"The uncertainty of the danger belongs to the essence of terrorism."

"The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country."

"From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out."

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Jürgen Habermas was born with a cleft palate and during his childhood had corrective surgery twice.

Connections

In 1955 Jürgen Habermas married Ute Wesselhöft. The couple has one daughter German historian and a professor of history Rebekka Habermas.

Spouse:

Ute Wesselhöft

Daughter:

Rebekka Habermas

Student:

Herbert Schnädelbach

Student:

Claus Offe

Student:

Hans-Herbert Kögler

Student:

Hans Joas

Student:

Axel Honneth

Student:

Jeremy J. Shapiro

References

• Jürgen Habermas: Una biografía
  2020