Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) was Germany's foremost social theorist and philosopher in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, on June 18, Habermas is the leading representative of the second generation of the so-called Frankfurt School of critical social theory, taking inspiration from Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. At the same time Habermas was strongly influenced by the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy from Ludwig Wittgenstein to John L. Austin and John Searle, as well as by the classics of German thought from Immanuel Kant and Georg W. F. Hegel to Karl Marx and Max Weber. In his magnum opus, The Theory of Communication Action (1981), Habermas explained the genesis of modern society in terms of basic categories derived from the philosophical study of language and rationality. This analysis reveals that the processes of rationalization...