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Jurgen Habermas Biography |
Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany) is a philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalist industrial society and of democracy and the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary (especially German) politics.
Habermas has integrated into a comprehensive framework of social theory and philosophy the German philosophical thought of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Dilthey, Husserl, and Gadamer, the Marxian tradition -- both the theory of Marx himself as well as the critical neo-Marxian theory of the Frankfurt School, i.e. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse --, the sociological theories of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead, the linguistic philosophy and speech act theories of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle, the American pragamatist tradition of Peirce and Dewey, and the sociological systems theory of Parsons.
Habermas considers his own major achievement 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 either the cosmos or the knowing subject. He carries forward the tradition 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 rationality.
Habermas burst onto the German intellectual scene in the 1950s with an influential critique of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He studied philosophy and sociology under the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, but because of a rift over him between the two took his Habilitation, in political science, at the University of Marburg under Wolfgang Abendroth. Very unusally for the German academic scene at that time, he was called to an extraordinary professorship of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg (at the instigation of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith), which he held until moving back to Frankfurt to a full Chair.
He accepted the position of Director of the Max Planck Institute 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. Habermas then returned to his chair at Frankfurt and the directorship of the Institute for Social Research. Since retiring from Frankfurt in 1993, Habermas has continued to publish extensively.
Jürgen Habermas's main aim has been to construct a social theory that is also a non-oppressive and inclusive universalist moral framework. The framework rests on the argument that all speech acts have an inherent telos--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 Austin and Searle, the theories of moral development of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of his Heidelberg colleague Karl-Otto Apel.
Within sociology, Habermas's major contribution is the development of a comprehensive theory of societal evolution and modernization focusing on the difference between communicative rationality and rationalization on the 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 Parsons.
His defence of modern society and civil society has been a source of inspiration to others, and is considered a major philosophical alternative to the varieties of poststructuralism. He has also offered an influential analysis of late capitalism.
Habermas sees the rationalization, humanization, and democratization of society in terms of the institutionalization of the rationality potential that is inherent in the communicative competence that is specific to the human species, has developed through the course of evolution, but in contemporary society is suppressed or weakened by the way in which major domains of social life, such as the market, the state, and organizations, have been given over to or taken over by strategic/instrumental rationality, so that the logic of the system supplants that of the lifeworld.
Habermas is famous as a teacher and mentor. Among his most prominent students have been the political sociologist Claus Offe (professor at Humboldt University in Berlin), the sociological theorist Hans Joas (professor at the Free University of Berlin and at the University of Chicago), the theorist of societal evolution Klaus Eder, the social philosopher Axel Honneth (the current director of the Institute for Social Research), and the American philosopher Thomas McCarthy.
Habermas is famous as a public intellectual as well as a scholar, and has used the popular press to attack neoconservative historians who have tried to relativize or lessen the importance of the Holocaust. He is perhaps most famous outside of Germany for his conceptualization of the public sphere.
Habermas visited China in April 2001 and received a big welcome. He gave numerous speeches under titles such as “Nation-states under the Pressure of Globalisation”.
Major works
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
On the Logic of the Social Sciences
Knowledge and Human Interests
Theory and Practice
Towards a Rational Society
Legitimation Crisis
Communication and the Evolution of Society
The Theory of Communicative Action Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns
Philosophical-Political Profiles
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
The New Conservatism
Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action
Postmetaphysical Thinking
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy
On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction
The Inclusion of the Other
The Postnational Constellation
The best interpretation in English of Habermas's work, especially his earlier work is still Thomas McCarthy's The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (MIT Press, 1978), which was written just as Habermas was developing his full-fledged communication theory. An especially clear account of Habermas's key views in philosophy, is provided by Raymond Geuss's The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1981). For a very short, good, more recent introduction focusing on Habermas's communication theory of society, see Jane Braaten's Habermas's Critical Theory of Society (State University of New York Press, 1991.) |
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