Jurgen Habermas b. 1929

Jurgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist, the most influential heir of the Frankfurt School and the foremost theorist of communicative reason. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere traced the rise and decline of the bourgeois public sphere in early modern Europe, while his two-volume Theory of Communicative Action argued that rationality is rooted not in the solitary subject but in the structures of intersubjective communication oriented toward mutual understanding. Between Facts and Norms developed a discourse theory of law and democracy in which legitimate political order rests on the free and reasoned public deliberation of free and equal citizens.

Jürgen Habermas was born at Düsseldorf in June 1929 and grew up at Gummersbach in the Rhineland. He studied philosophy, history, psychology, and German literature at Göttingen, Zurich, and Bonn, where he took his doctorate in 1954 with a dissertation on Schelling. From 1956 to 1959 he was research assistant to Theodor Adorno at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, and habilitated under Wolfgang Abendroth at Marburg in 1961 with the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. He held chairs at Heidelberg, Frankfurt (1964–1971 and again 1983–1994), and the Max Planck Institute at Starnberg.

His major works include Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), Legitimation Crisis (1973), the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Between Facts and Norms (1992), The Postnational Constellation (1998), Truth and Justification (1999), the essays of An Awareness of What Is Missing (2008), and the two-volume late synthesis Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019).

Habermas reconstructed the Frankfurt-School project as a theory of communicative rationality grounded in the idealising presuppositions of everyday speech. He defended discourse ethics, in which valid moral norms are those that could meet with the rational consent of all affected parties under conditions approaching the ideal speech situation; a deliberative model of democracy that mediates between facts and norms; and a postmetaphysical and postnational politics for the European Union. He has long been the most prominent public intellectual in the German-speaking world.