Habermas, Jürgen (1929—)
German philosopher, best known for concepts of communicative action and the public sphere. An immensely influential figure, particularly in his native country, Habermas’s shadow looms large over almost every aspect of research in the human and social sciences. The only comparable figures in terms of impact in this field are Foucault, Michel and Niklas *Luhmann. Habermas was born in Düsseldorf in Northern Germany, but he spent his early life in Gummersbach, where his grandfather was the director of a Protestant seminary. His father was the director of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in the neighbouring city of Cologne. In interviews he has described his father as a Nazi sympathizer and admitted that like Günter Grass he was a member of the Hitler Youth. This experience, particularly Germany’s defeat and the aftermath, including the Nuremberg ‘War Crimes’ trials, could not but be formative for Habermas, and they left him a stern critic of politics. He completed his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Göttingen and Zürich, then completed a doctorate in 1954 at the University of Bonn entitled, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (The absolute and history: on the contradiction in Schelling’s thought). In 1956 he moved to Frankfurt to complete his habilitation at the home of critical theory, the Institute for Social Research, under the direction of Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. Interestingly, although Habermas would remain connected in some way or another to the Institute for Social Research for the rest of his career, he did not finish his habilitation there. He fell out with Horkheimer over the direction his thesis should take, so he transferred to the University of Marburg. In 1962, at the instigation of Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Habermas was offered a position at Heidelberg University, which he accepted, but two years later he was lured back to Frankfurt by Adorno to take over Horkheimer’s recently vacated chair. He remained there until 1970, when he moved to the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg. A decade later he returned to Frankfurt and took over as director of the Institute for Social Research. Beginning in the early 1980s, Habermas also accepted a number of visiting professorships in the US. Unusually for a dissertation, Habermas’s first work, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit; Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (1962), translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989), proved an enduring success. It introduces the important concept of the public sphere, which is a realm in society where citizens can freely express opinions relating to general or public interest topics. Habermas treats the public sphere as a historical category and his research focuses on how specific types of public sphere emerge and correspondingly what causes their demise. Post-structuralist critics like Lyotard, Jean-François are sharply critical of the concept’s inherent idealism, but it has nevertheless proven highly useful for thinking through the transformations that have shaped what is generally known today as postmodernism. One of Habermas’s most influential pieces of work was a short essay he wrote entitled ‘Modernity---An Incomplete Project’ (1983), which was a polemical shot across the bow of postmodernism at the moment of its birth. Rather than recognize the advent of a new era as many critics (e.g. Jameson, Fredric) did at the start of the 1980s, Habermas took the counter-intuitive position that modernity, i.e. the logical precursor to postmodernity, had not yet reached its zenith, and, moreover, that its emancipatory project was worth continuing with and shouldn’t be abandoned so lightly. Habermas’s interest in the public sphere developed over the next two decades into a general theory of society, culminating in his magnum opus Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (1981), translated as The Theory of Communicative Action (1984). Habermas’s theory is that all social life can be explained in terms of the ability of humans to communicate with one another. Most important for Habermas is the ability to use language to do things, not merely to command other people to perform a particular act, but to change the very symbolic status of a person, place, or object. In this last respect, he draws on and extends the theory of performative language developed by Austin, John Langshaw and bare life and Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s theory of language games. Since the publication of The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas has tried to use the central theses of that work to analyse and critique ethical and political issues relating to contemporary world events. The culmination of this work is the magisterial Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (1992), translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1998). He was awarded the 2005 Holberg Prize. Further Reading: A. Bowie Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (2003). A. Edgar The Philosophy of Habermas (2005). R. Holub Jürgen Habermas (1991). T. McCarthy The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (1984). D. Rasmussen Reading Habermas (1990).