Jürgen Habermas

Philosopher and sociologist

• Born: June 18, 1929
• Place of Birth: Düsseldorf, Germany

Jürgen Habermas is best known for developing a theory of communicative action based on locating the source of rationality in interpersonal speech acts, rather than in the ontological structures of nature (how things are) or in the epistemological structures of the human subject (how we know what we know). His theory is based on the extension of a commitment to Enlightenment liberation but in the context of an inclusive sense of ethical discourse. His philosophy counters social theories based on commitments to egocentricity or ethnocentricity and defends modern institutional forms of democratic civil society.

Early Life

Jürgen Habermas spent his first sixteen years in Gummersbach, Germany, during the Nazi era. His father was executive director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce and a Nazi sympathizer. Habermas himself served in the Hitler Youth but was unaware of the Nazi atrocities until he viewed documentary films after World War II. Realizing the criminal tyranny that was able to proliferate because of a fascist political system, Habermas was deeply disappointed when former Nazis almost seamlessly became government ministers, judges, doctors, and other officials in the new German democratic government formed in 1949.

Habermas studied philosophy from 1949 to 1954 at Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn, and earned his PhD with the dissertation Das Absolute und die Geschichte: Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (1954; The Absolute and History: On Ambivalence in Schelling’s Thought). He became aware of the extent of the commitment to Nazism of the famous German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and this early critical awareness guided him throughout his life as an academic and a public intellectual.

Habermas studied philosophy with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt and was inspired by György Lukác’s History and Class Consciousness and Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer, however, rejected Habermas’s postdoctoral thesis, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (1962; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 1989). Nevertheless, Habermas completed his work in political science with Wolfgang Abendroth at the University of Marburg. With this work, Habermas attempted a socio-philosophical analysis of what he believed were mistakes built into the existing political system of the German Federal Republic.

In 1961 Habermas became a lecturer at the University of Marburg and, in 1962, with the support of Hans Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith, was appointed a professor at the University of Heidelberg. In 1964, Habermas took over Horkheimer’s chair in philosophy and sociology at Frankfurt.

In 1971, Habermas left his position in Frankfurt to accept an invitation to become a codirector at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, Germany. He returned to his chair in philosophy and as director of Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research in 1983. He retired in 1994 but accepted a position as permanent visiting professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Life’s Work

Habermas’s work can be charted by following his intellectual analysis of the public sphere as an institution. Accordingly, the distinct spheres of “public” and “private” emerged out of the establishment of the bourgeois state under the rule of law that took shape as human societies transitioned into organized systems of capitalism. This transition, in turn, required the development of the public sphere to monitor and legitimate power by way of public discussions open to equal participation by members of each respective sphere.

With the dialectical progression of the “societification” of the state and the “stateification” of society, however, the independence of the public sphere dissolved into a realm no longer characterized by rational discussion and debate but by competition between interest groups and a media focused on how to win fame and influence. Government decisions became uncritically accepted, and the press no longer created a discriminating public because of government control and its reliance on advertising. Political parties became incapable of enlightening the public because they served their bureaucratic leaders. Habermas argued that the public sphere emerged in the first place to understand and check power but devolved into its own domain of self-serving power. This occurred because humans were conditioned by instrumental reason and lost their ability to ethically orient themselves.

Habermas hoped to rationalize the practices of social and political communication acts by returning to some core principles of Enlightenment philosophy, namely, the commitment to uncovering those conditions that limit the possibilities of how humans understand their own roles in identifying and resolving conflicts that arise from actions. He initially formed the problem and his response to it by distinguishing between the roles of labor and communicative action in the progress of science and technology with Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien (1963; Theory and Practice, 1989). He continued that analysis by adding that labor is motivated and regulated by purposive rational action that is necessarily instrumental, in Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie” (1968; Technology and Science as Ideology). Other works followed, such as Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (1973; The Legitimation Crisis, 1976), in which he criticized the values of modern capitalist society, and Communication and the Evolution of Society (1984) and Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1984; On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction, 2002) that deepened that critique and helped prepare for his own theory of rationality that is linguistically and ethically oriented.

Habermas elevated his model of communicative action and ethical discourse of daily life over and against the dominant practice of Western, democratic sociopolitical organization. His model of communicative action and ethical discourse is based on the occurrence of necessarily valid norms that are understood and recognized by at least two subjects who interact with each other. His counter-critique of the Marxist critique of modern forms of capitalist economy maintains that human action is not limited to the instrumental and strategic dimension of technically useful knowledge, but is just as much defined by interactions in the dimension of moral-political intention. This is the major theoretical axis that was crystallized in his two-volume magnum opus, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981, 1987; The Theory of Communicative Action, 1985, 1989).

Habermas constructs a model of discourse theory that assumes an “ideal speech situation” to arrive at an actual consensus of a group of speakers in a discourse. First, such a discourse must be open and allow for full engagement of participants, provide equivalent chances for all members for expression, and enable equal opportunities to regulate the interchanges. Participants can thus move into the realm of argument based on discursive logic and to attain the force of enduring social and moral effectiveness. Such a logic cannot be merely analytic but must consist of varying series of speech acts understood as pragmatically engaged units of speech such as assertions, explanations, requirements, evaluations, and justifications. Prioritizing pragmatic linguistic engagement is essential if such discourse is to attain the kind of actual consensual force that determines norms for society.

Second, such engaged discourse must be grounded in acceptances or rejections of validity claims that secure substantive plausibility claims of this or that norm rather than truth claims of logical continuity. The attainment of such norms grounded in practical plausibility have to prove their general validity only within their specific spheres of influence, thus proving their plausibility by a measure of universality.

Third, participants in this revised public discourse ethics must be able to freely move from one language sphere to any other to criticize this or that linguistic system for its ability or inability to appropriately or adequately describe reality. The final synthesis of these moments is that the validity claims of the communicative acts of this or that discourse should converge with sensible, that is, with practical-moral social change. In other words, not only is theory drawn from the resources of everyday life to affect institutional systems of jurisprudence, education, and distribution of resources, but those institutions themselves are drawn into the realm of Habermasian critical theory.

By the 1990s, Habermas was widely regarded as one of the leading intellectuals of the Western world, though public interest in his work reportedly declined in the early twenty-first century. His ideas had become highly influential but also faced significant criticism from both the left and right ends of the political spectrum. Habermas continued to develop his communicative theory, addressing his critics with works such as Faktizität und Geltung (1992; Between Facts and Norms), Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (1996; The Inclusion of the Other), Die postnationale Konstellation (1998; The Postnational Constitution), and Zeit der Ubergänge (2001; Time of Transitions).

Habermas also published works examining religion and rational thought, connected themes that had interested him throughout his career. Among the ideas explored 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), Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion (2005; Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, 2008), Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt (2008; An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, 2010) and other writings was the concept of postsecular constellations, or seemingly opposing but coexisting institutions such as religion and the secular. In his multivolume Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019, 2022; Also a History of Philosophy, 2023–24), Habermas expounds on what he sees as the Christian origins of liberalism and appeals to modern Christians to promulgate liberal ideals in religious terms.

Geopolitics was another major area of interest for Habermas during this period. He critiqued Western, and particularly European, decisions and offered his own visions in books such as The Divided West (2006), Ach, Europa (2009; Europe: The Faltering Project, 2010), The Crisis of the European Union: A Response (2012), and The Lure of Technocracy (2015).

Habermas revisited some of his earliest thoughts on the role of dialog in the public sphere with Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik (A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, 2023). In that work, he explores the impacts of the digital revolution, with its algorithmic bubbles and echo chambers, on democratic discourse.

Habermas's work gained him international recognition as one of the world's most important thinkers. He was awarded the 1986 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Community, the highest honor in German research, as well as the 2004 Kyoto Prize, the 2013 Erasmus Prize, and the 2015 John W. Kluge Prize. He initially accepted but ultimately refused the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2021, citing human rights concerns in the United Arab Emirates and the close association between the award organization and the monarchy there.

Significance

Habermas rekindled a passion for Enlightenment forms of humanism and universalism. His work, however difficult, expresses an optimistic faith that humans can trust in themselves and their innate potential for rationality to solve their own problems.

Habermas earned international respect for his early criticism of Martin Heidegger. He also had a role in countering the claims of German revisionist historians in the 1980s, who downplayed the significance of the Holocaust and the extent of the German people's complicity. Habermas has continued to weigh in on matters of international import, and particularly armed conflicts including the NATO intervention in Kosovo, the US-led Iraq War, the Syrian Civil War and resulting migrant crisis in Europe, Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in 2023. He has also actively supported global environmental initiatives, such as the Kyoto Protocol. In 2024, he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science.

Habermas's theories and positions on political matters have not been without controversy, however. Neoconservative thinkers have unsurprisingly viewed Habermas's liberal theories with skepticism, suggesting that rational discussion is an inadequate solution to the deep-seated issues facing societies at the domestic and international levels. Some left-leaning observers also see Habermas as naive, suggesting that his view was Eurocentric or failed to adequately rebut the inequality and injustice allowed by established systems and institutions in politics, economics, and culture. Marxists, postmodernists, race theorists, and feminists are among those who have critiqued his ideas from the left.

Personal Life

Habermas married Ute Wesselhöft in 1955. Inspired by Viennese architect Albert Loos, they built a home in Starnberg filled with light and books in the modernist Bauhaus style. They raised three children, Tilmann, Rebekka, and Judith. When Habermas accepted his visiting professorship with Northwestern University, the couple retained a home outside Munich.

Bibliography

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Habermas, Jürgen. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Vol. 2 in The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Beacon, 1985.

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Specter, Matthew G. Habermas: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge UP, 2010.

Tooze, Adam. “After the Zeitenwende: Jürgen Habermas and Germany’s New Identity Crisis.” New Statesman, 12 May 2022, www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/05/after-the-zeitenwende-jurgen-habermas-and-germanys-new-identity-crisis. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

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