Jurgen Habermas | Biography

The German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas challenged social science by suggesting that human beings are capable of rationality and under some conditions are able to communicate with one another successfully; the barriers preventing the exercise of reason and mutual understanding can be identified, comprehended, and reduced.

Jürgen Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, on June 18, 1929. At the end of World War II, he was repulsed by the Germans' "collectively realized inhumanity," which characterized, he believed, their lack of response to the revelations in the Nürenberg trials about the Nazi death machine. His own very different shock and horror constituted "that first rupture, which still gapes."

Entering the University of Bonn in 1946, he began to speculate about the meaning of such concepts as reason, freedom, and justice, in part by reading Hegel, Marx, and the Hungarian Georg Lukács. Habermas obtained his Ph.D. in 1954. Shortly thereafter he moved to the University of Frankfurt where, until 1959, he served as assistant to Professor Theodor Adorno, who was associated with the Institute for Social Research. The Frankfurt Institute breached traditional boundaries that separate literary criticism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and social science and attempted to understand critically the various elements comprising modern society. In time Habermas would become the successor to the school's tradition.

Even before he came to Frankfurt, Habermas began publishing criticism and social commentary on a wide range of topics. As he developed more powerful ideas, and as these ideas appeared in books rather than scattered among many periodicals, his impact became widespread. His overall goal was to construct a social theory that could effect the emancipation of people from arbitrary social constraint.

As assistant to Adorno, Habermas collaborated in a survey of Frankfurt University students which resulted in the book Student and Politics. He returned to this subject when he analyzed the student movement of the late 1960s. He supported academic reform and opposed militant student behavior.

Habermas' early theoretical works examined broad changes in the way Western civilization treats political ideals. For example, in Theory and Practice (1962) he traced the change from the study of Platonic ideas to the study of effective means for manipulating citizens, as exemplified by modern social science. In Strukturwandlung der öffentlichkeit (1962) he examined changes in concepts of the public and the private spheres. He considered the differences between natural science research and social science research and reviewed the methods on which historical, sociological, and linguistic work was based. This work was the first which reflected his lifelong preoccupation with the ways in which social scientists study human behavior. He emphasized the importance of language. "What raises us out of nature," he stated, "is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us."

Contemporary society and its transformation by science and technology were his continuing concern. In the early 1970s he examined the ideological roles science and technology play (Toward a Rational Society, 1971) and studied the social and cultural contradictions in modern societies in which the legitimacy of political systems has been increasingly challenged (Legitimation Crisis, 1973).

Habermas spent most of his work life as a professor in a university setting. However, between 1971 and 1983 he directed the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Starnberg, near Munich. His theoretical perspective included evolutionary anthropology, linguistic theory, and theories of Piaget and Kohlberg.

Habermas was often at the center of controversy. In the early 1980s, when he was still directing the Max Planck Institute, he was too controversial for the University of Munich to appoint as an adjunct professor. Still, he received many prizes, awards, and honors. He served as Theodore Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, which awarded him an honorary degree, as did Cambridge University.

Habermas continued to involve himself in political questions of the day. In the late 1970s, when the German government was suspending civil liberties in an effort to stop terrorism, he feared that threats to democratic institutions and a possible witch hunt of left-wing intellectuals. He sent a circular letter to fifty German critics, writers, and social scientists and asked them to contribute to a book that would express the diversity of concerns about the spiritual situation of the age (Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age," 1979).

In 1981 Habermas published what he called his "magnum opus," The Theory of Communicative Action. Here he brought together previous work and developed the concept of rationality; he constructed a concept of society that integrated what he called "the lifeworld paradigm" with a system paradigm; and he elaborated a critical theory of modernity.

When Habermas left the Max Planck Institute in 1983 he returned once again to the University of Frankfurt as professor of philosophy. He was married and had three children.

Called the "leading social thinker in Germany today," Habermas was compared to Hegel and Marx. Certainly Habermas had close intellectual ties to Marx; however, he objected to the Marxian reduction of history and culture to mere economic processes, and humanized Marxian dialectic through his introduction of his theory of knowledge.

With Hegel, Habermas shared the belief in the power of reason and discourse to establish social truths, but he placed greater emphasis on the individual's ability to reason and the social group's ability to reach a consensus of opinion on values and social norms of behavior.

After Theory of Social Action, (1981), Habermas published The Critique of Functionalist Reason (1984.) In both volumes he sought to integrate the individual's life experience with his total social context, the "system paradigm." He also took to task the views of several historic and contemporary social thinkers.

Habermas published Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy(1996) and in 1999, he released A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany on events in Germany after 1989.