Habermas, Jürgen (1929–)

Born in 1929, Habermas is one of the most prominent public intellectuals and probably the most influential German philosopher and social theorist of the post–World War II period. As a representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, his lifework dealt with the problem of the normative foundations of social criticism and critical inquiry.

Profoundly influenced by the traumatic events of his youth under national socialism, and critical of continuities in the personnel of the political class from Nazism to liberal democracy, he became research assistant of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno from 1955 to 1959, to later lecture in philosophy and sociology at the universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt, holding a chair at the latter from 1983 to 1994.

Picking up elements from the approaches of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons, Habermas developed a theory of sociocultural evolution as the historical development of forms of communicative interaction and mutual understanding. In his postdoctoral lecturing qualification titled Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere of 1961, Habermas put forward the modern idea of the public sphere as opposed to the classical idea of representation, the latter being manifested in the idea that the ruling social forces represent the society as a whole. He reconstructed the idea and practice of the public sphere by giving a historical analysis of its emergence in the 18th century (and its later decline) made possible by a sociocultural differentiation of the nuclear family, a civic society concentrated on the exchange of goods, and an arena of public power. The political public's emancipatory potential was expressed best in the upcoming independent journalism and print media. The idea of a public sphere is closely connected to the ideal that the best argument will succeed. This concept of a public disputing freely can be read as an early allusion to Habermas's concept of the discourse ethics.

Right from the beginning, Habermas acknowledged that the ideal of egalitarian humanity in the political public was cut down by the fact that essentially only male, middle-class property owners saw their personal interest converging with the bourgeois society. In addition, the commencing decline of the civic public in the 19th century is marked by the commercialized and economic concentration of the press that led to a situation in which it only represented privatized individual or collective interests. Instead of shaping the liberal public sphere as a forum for critical public discussion of matters of general concern and legitimating political authority through rational discussion and reasoned agreement the development created a situation in which the media mainly contributed to the production of a noncritical following.

Knowledge and Human Interests of 1968 is one of the high-circulation books of Habermas. Its main thesis is that every scientific/academic research is tied to specific interests. Whilst mainly in natural sciences there is [Page 666]an interrelation between the methodical rules and the interests driving the cognition that can be called technical as the results primarily deal with the issue of instrumental availability, there is a more practical interest in hermeneutic humanities that is about the intersubjective transmission of complexes of meaning. Finally, critical theory is characterized by the interest of “emancipation.” The late Habermas complained that these three rationalities do not play together in the modern age as there is a dominance of the instrumental understanding.

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