Jürgen Habermas

Introduction

Jürgen Habermas is the German philosopher and sociologist who led the second generation of the Frankfurt School from the 1960s onward, reoriented Critical Theory toward a reconstructive theory of communicative rationality, and produced in the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981) the major systematic work of late-twentieth-century continental social philosophy. He is the most institutionally influential living German philosopher and one of the most-cited social theorists of the postwar period.

Habermas's career has combined academic philosophy with sustained public engagement. He has intervened in nearly every major German political controversy since the 1960s — the student movement of 1968, the Historikerstreit of the 1980s over the historicization of the Holocaust, the debate over German reunification in 1989–90, the question of EU constitutional reform, the contemporary debates over migration, populism, and the public sphere. The combination of theoretical work with public intervention is unusual even by the standards of German academic culture.

Life

Jürgen Habermas was born on June 18, 1929, in Düsseldorf and grew up in Gummersbach, where his father directed the Bureau of Trade and Industry. The childhood was marked by two formative facts: a cleft palate that required multiple surgeries and shaped his self-consciousness about speech, and the experience of growing up under National Socialism. Habermas was a member of the Hitler Youth in his early teens (compulsory in that period); the revelations of the Nuremberg trials in 1945–46, when he was sixteen, were a decisive break and shaped his lifelong commitment to democratic public life.

Habermas studied philosophy, history, psychology, German literature, and economics at Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn from 1949 to 1954, taking his PhD at Bonn in 1954 with a dissertation on Schelling. After two years in journalism (writing for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other major papers), he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1956 as Adorno's assistant. The relationship with Adorno and Horkheimer was complicated; Horkheimer in particular blocked Habermas's Habilitation at Frankfurt on political grounds in 1959.

Habermas completed the Habilitation at Marburg in 1961 under Wolfgang Abendroth; the published version, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), appeared in 1962 and remains one of his most-read works. He held chairs at Heidelberg (1961–64), Frankfurt (1964–71 and again 1983–94), and the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg (1971–83). The Starnberg years produced the materials of the Theory of Communicative Action, which appeared in two volumes in 1981.

Habermas formally retired from Frankfurt in 1994 but has continued to publish at the rate of a major book every few years. Recent work includes Between Naturalism and Religion (2005), the two-volume Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (This Too A History of Philosophy, 2019), and continuing essays on EU politics, the public sphere, and contemporary religious-secular debates.

The problem he worked on

Habermas's project, across six decades, is the reconstruction of Critical Theory after what he takes to be the impasses of the first generation. The first-generation Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer especially) had developed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947) a comprehensive critique of instrumental reason but had no positive resources for grounding an alternative: any rational critique seemed to be captured by the very instrumental reason it criticized.

Habermas's response is the distinction between instrumental and communicative rationality. Communicative rationality is the form of reason oriented toward understanding rather than control — the rationality that operates when speakers attempt to reach agreement on the basis of reasons that all participants can accept. The distinction allows Habermas to preserve the first generation's critique of instrumental reason while recovering rational grounds for the critique itself: the critique operates from the standpoint of communicative reason, which is not reducible to the instrumental reason being criticized.

Contributions

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

The 1962 Habilitation thesis is Habermas's most-read single work. The book traces the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe — the coffeehouses of London, the salons of Paris, the reading societies of Germany — as the institutional context within which private citizens came together to engage in rational-critical discussion of matters of public concern. The bourgeois public sphere produced the conditions for the democratic transformation of political life: a forum in which the legitimacy of state action could be assessed against publicly articulated reasons.

The second half of the book traces the refeudalization of the public sphere in late capitalism: the displacement of rational-critical discourse by the manipulated public opinion produced by mass media, advertising, and the culture industry. The Habermasian framework provides one of the most influential single accounts of the rise and decline of modern democratic public life.

The book has been continuously generative. The contemporary literature on digital public spheres (Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins, Zeynep Tufekci), on deliberative democracy (Joshua Cohen, James Bohman), on the public sphere of social movements, and on the contemporary challenges to democratic discourse all engage Habermas's 1962 framework.

The theory of communicative action

The two-volume Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (The Theory of Communicative Action, 1981) is Habermas's major systematic work and one of the canonical works of late-twentieth-century social philosophy. Volume 1 (Reason and the Rationalization of Society) develops the theory of rationality and engages the major sociological tradition (Weber, Durkheim, Mead); Volume 2 (Lifeworld and System) develops the analysis of contemporary society as the interaction between the lifeworld (the everyday context of communicative action) and the system (the institutional spheres of money and power organized by instrumental rationality).

The central methodological move is the analysis of communicative action through the formal structure of speech acts. Habermas draws on the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin and John Searle, on the linguistic philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, and on the developmental psychology of Lawrence Kohlberg to construct a universal pragmatics — the analysis of the necessary presuppositions of any successful communicative action. Every speech act, on Habermas's analysis, raises three validity claims: truth (about the objective world), rightness (about the social world of norms), and sincerity (about the subjective world of intentions). The rational redemption of these claims requires the ideal speech situation — the conditions under which the only force at work is the force of the better argument.

The framework has been the major resource for late-twentieth-century discourse ethics, deliberative democracy, and the broader engagement with the public sphere. The contemporary work of Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst, Seyla Benhabib, and the broader third generation of Critical Theory develops the framework directly.

Discourse ethics

Habermas's discourse ethics, developed in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983) and Justification and Application (1991), extends the framework of the theory of communicative action into normative ethical theory. The central principle: a norm is morally valid only if all those affected by it could accept it in a rational discourse free of coercion and manipulation. The principle is procedural rather than substantive: it does not specify particular moral content but provides a test by which any proposed norm can be evaluated.

Discourse ethics has been continuously contested. Critics (Charles Taylor, Iris Marion Young, Alasdair MacIntyre) argue that the procedural framework either presupposes substantive ethical commitments it cannot acknowledge or is too thin to yield determinate moral guidance. Defenders (Habermas himself, Rainer Forst, Karl-Otto Apel in a parallel transcendental version) argue that the procedural framework is precisely what allows for moral judgment under conditions of cultural pluralism in which substantive ethical agreement cannot be presupposed.

Between Facts and Norms

The 1992 Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms) is Habermas's major work in political philosophy. The book develops a discourse-theoretic account of law and democracy that engages directly with the Anglo-American liberal political philosophy of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin while preserving the Critical Theory orientation toward democratic legitimation. The central claim: legitimate law is law that could be agreed to by all citizens in rational discourse; democratic procedures are the institutional mechanisms by which this legitimating discourse is conducted.

The Habermas–Rawls exchange of the mid-1990s (collected in part in Habermas's The Inclusion of the Other, 1996) was one of the most significant interactions between Continental and Anglo-American political philosophy in the postwar period. Both philosophers engage the question of how a liberal democracy can legitimate itself under conditions of reasonable pluralism; their answers differ in instructive ways that continue to organize contemporary debate.

Public interventions

Habermas's record of public intervention is unmatched among contemporary German philosophers. His engagement with the 1968 student movement (the Hannover lectures of 1967, the contested links faschisten charge against the radicalized left); his role in the Historikerstreit of 1986–87 against the conservative attempts to relativize the Holocaust; his contributions to the debates over German reunification, EU constitutional reform, the post-9/11 international order, and contemporary populism have made him a public intellectual of a kind almost without parallel in postwar academic culture.

The ongoing dialogue with the Catholic intellectual tradition has been one of the most distinctive features of his late work. The 2004 conversation with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) on the foundations of liberal democracy, and the continuing engagement with the place of religion in the public sphere, have shaped contemporary debates on secularism and post-secularism.

Key works

• The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)
• Knowledge and Human Interests (1968)
• Theory and Practice (1971, English; collected German essays)
• Legitimation Crisis (1973)
• The Theory of Communicative Action (two volumes, 1981)
• Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983)
• The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985)
• Postmetaphysical Thinking (1988)
• Between Facts and Norms (1992)
• The Inclusion of the Other (1996)
• The Future of Human Nature (2001)
• Between Naturalism and Religion (2005)
• Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (two volumes, 2019)

The Suhrkamp Verlag editions are the German standard; the MIT Press editions (translations by Thomas McCarthy, Christian Lenhardt, William Mark Hohengarten, Ciaran Cronin, and others) are the dominant English texts.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Adorno and Horkheimer (his Frankfurt teachers); Marx and the Western Marxist tradition; Hegel (the dialectical framework); Max Weber (the sociology of modernity); George Herbert Mead (the social theory of the self); the later Wittgenstein and the analytic philosophy of language (J. L. Austin, John Searle); the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg; Karl-Otto Apel (his closest contemporary interlocutor on discourse ethics).

Influenced: The third generation of Critical Theory through Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, Rainer Forst, James Bohman, Thomas McCarthy; the deliberative democracy tradition through Joshua Cohen, Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson; the contemporary public sphere literature through Nancy Fraser, Craig Calhoun; the contemporary cosmopolitan political philosophy; the analytic philosophy engagement with discourse ethics through Stephen Darwall and others; the recent populism and democratic-theory literature through Jan-Werner Müller and others.

Reception

Habermas's contemporary reception has been continuous and large. The Structural Transformation established his international reputation in the 1960s; the Theory of Communicative Action made him the major living German philosopher in the 1980s; the post-1989 work has kept him at the center of European political philosophy.

The Anglo-American reception, mediated initially through Thomas McCarthy's translations and his major The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (1978), brought Habermas into mainstream analytic political philosophy. The Habermas–Rawls exchange of the mid-1990s was a major moment of dialogue between the two traditions. The contemporary deliberative democracy movement is in large part a development of Habermas's framework, even where particular Habermasian positions are modified or rejected.

Critical reception has come from several directions. Foucault and the broader post-structuralist tradition rejected Habermas's appeal to ideal speech conditions as an unjustified universalism. Conservative critics (Robert Spaemann, Joseph Ratzinger) engaged Habermas on the religious-secular question. Feminist and post-colonial critics (Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Amy Allen) have argued that the discourse-ethics framework underplays the structural conditions that make rational discourse impossible for marginalized groups.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Stefan Müller-Doohm's Habermas: A Biography (2014, English 2016), William Outhwaite's Habermas: A Critical Introduction (1994, revised 2009), Maeve Cooke's Language and Reason (1994), Stephen White's The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas (1988) and his subsequent work, James Bohman's Public Deliberation (1996), and the work of Amy Allen on the entanglements of critical theory with the legacies of colonialism. The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (White, ed., 1995), the Constellations journal, and the European Journal of Political Theory anchor continuing engagement. Active debates concern the Habermasian engagement with religion, the contemporary applicability of the public sphere framework under conditions of digital media and platform capitalism, and the relation between Habermasian and post-Habermasian Critical Theory.

Further reading

• Critical Theory — the tradition he led into its second generation
• Adorno — his Frankfurt teacher
• Horkheimer — his Frankfurt teacher
• Marx — the analytical framework his work develops
• Hegel — the dialectical predecessor
• Marxism — the broader tradition his work belongs to

The German philosopher and sociologist who led the second generation of the Frankfurt School and developed the theory of communicative action.