Jürgen Habermas

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Habermas speaking with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, 2004

This article is about Jürgen Habermas. For the Christian apologist and theologian, see Gary Habermas.

Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany) is a philosopher, political scientist and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory. His work has been called Neo-Marxist, and 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.

Biography

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 pragmatist tradition of Peirce and Dewey, and the sociological systems theory of Parsons. He is well known for his work on the concept of the public sphere.

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. The program that argues to this effect is called universal pragmatics. He carries forward the traditions 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 reason, in part through discourse ethics.

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 his dissertation between the two — Horkheimer believed that Habermas was too radical and had made unacceptable demands for revision — he took his Habilitation in political science at the University of Marburg under Wolfgang Abendroth, one of the new Marxist professors in Germany at the time. In 1961, he became a privatdozent in Marburg, and very unusual in 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) in 1962. In 1964, strongly supported by Adorno, Habermas returned to Frankfurt to take over Horkheimer's chair in philosophy and sociology.

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. In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.

Theory

Jürgen Habermas's main aim has been to construct a social theory that advances the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral framework. The framework rests on the argument (called "universal pragmatics") that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for "purpose" or "goal") — 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 Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and John Searle, the sociological theory of the interactional constitution of mind and self of Mead, 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 Talcott 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 potential for rationality that is inherent in the communicative competence that is unique to the human species. Habermas believes communicative competence has developed through the course of evolution, but in contemporary society it 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 of Berlin), the sociological theorist Hans Jonas (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; most notably, in the 1980s he used the popular press to attack historians (i.e., Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber) who, arguably, had tried to demarcate Nazi rule and the Holocaust from the mainstream of German history, explain away Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism, and partially rehabilitate the reputation of the German Army, or Wehrmacht, during World War II. (The so-called "Historikerstreit," or "Historians' Quarrel" was not at all one-sided, because Habermas was himself attacked by eminent scholars like Joachim Fest and Klaus Hildebrand.) More recently, Habermas has been outspoken in his opposition to the American invasion of Iraq. He is perhaps most famous outside of Germany for his conceptualization of the public sphere.

Habermas visited the People's Republic of China in April 2001 and received a big welcome. He gave numerous speeches under titles such as "Nation-States under the Pressure of Globalisation." Habermas was also the 2004 Kyoto Laureate in the Arts and Philosophy section. He traveled to San Diego and on March 5, 2005, as part of the University of San Diego's Kyoto Symposium, gave a speech entitled The Public Role of Religion in Secular Context, regarding the evolution of separation of Church and State from neutrality to intense secularism.

Habermas and Jacques Derrida, perhaps Europe's two most influential philosophers, engaged in somewhat acrimonious disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminated in a refusal of extended debate and talking past one another. Following Habermas's publication of "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me" ("Is There a Philosophical Language?," p. 218, in Points...). Others prominent in deconstruction, notably Jean-François Lyotard, engaged in more extended polemics against Habermas, whereas Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe found these polemics counterproductive (in hindsight they probably contributed to a rift within deconstruction), as they tended to circle around what one may regard as overinvestment in an opposition between modernism and postmodernism — these terms were occasionally elevated to totemic if not cosmological importance in the 1980s, due in no small part to works by Lyotard and Habermas and their often enthusiastic and sometimes uncautious reception in American universities. It may not be unreasonable to generalize that schematic terminology such as poststructuralism, trafficked heavily in the United States but virtually unknown in France yet imported into some of Habermas's readings of his French contemporaries, inflected their exchanges with the vitriol of the "culture wars" which had begun to rage in the American academy and helped overheat matters at a time when many prominent European academics saw strategic value and career opportunities in extending their influence in America, arguably the world's largest market for academic imports. In short: although the differences between Habermas and Derrida (if not deconstruction generally) were profound but not necessarily irreconcilable, they were fueled by polemical responses to mischaracterizations of those differences, which in turn sharply inhibited meaningful discussion.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Derrida and Habermas established a limited political solidarity and put their previous disputes behind them in the interest of "friendly and open-minded interchange," as Habermas put it. After laying out their individual opinions on 9/11 in Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Derrida wrote a foreword expressing his unqualified subscription to Habermas's declaration, alternatively titled "The 15th of February, or: What Binds the Europeans. – A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy—First of all, in Core-Europe” or “Our Renewal. After the War: The Rebirth of Europe” (unfortunately, no authorized translation of this text is freely available in English). Habermas has offered further context for this declaration in an interview. Quite distinct from this, Geoffrey Bennington, a close associate of Derrida's, has in a further conciliatory gesture offered an account of deconstruction intended to provide some mutual intelligibility. Derrida was already extremely ill by the time the two had begun their new exchange, and the two were not able to develop this such that they could substantially revisit previous disagreements or find more profound terms of discussion before Derrida's death. Nevertheless, this late collaboration has encouraged some scholars to revisit the positions, recent and past, of both thinkers, vis-a-vis the other.

The Public Sphere

Jürgen Habermas wrote extensively on the concept of the public sphere, using accounts of dialogue that took place in coffee houses in 18th century England. He distinguished between looking at the public sphere as a concept and as a historical formation. In his view, the idea of the public sphere involved the notion that private entities would draw together as a public entity and engage in rational deliberation, ultimately making decisions that would influence the state. As a historical formation, the public sphere involved a "space" separated from family life, the business world, and the state.

According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the decay of the public sphere. Most importantly, structural forces, particularly the growth of a commercial mass media, resulted in a situation in which media became more of a commodity – something to be consumed – rather than a tool for public discourse.

Several noted academics have provided various criticisms of Habermas's notions regarding the public sphere. John Thompson, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, has pointed out that Habermas's notion of the public sphere is antiquated due to the proliferation of mass-media communications. Michael Schudson from the University of California, San Diego argues more generally: that a public sphere as a place of purely rational independent debate never existed.

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
• A Berlin Republic, a collection of interviews with Habermas

A very good interpretation in English of Habermas's 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' 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.) For a recent comprehensive introduction to Habermas's mature theory and its political implications both nationally and globally see Erik Oddvar Eriksen and Jarle Weigard, Understanding Habermas: Communicative Action and Deliberative Democracy (Continuum International Publishing, 2004), ISBN 082647179X.

The Norwegian Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund awards the €520.000 endowed Holberg International Memorial Prize to Jürgen Habermas in 2005.

See also

• Zoran Đinđić
• Public sphere

External links

• Habermas links collected by Antti Kauppinen (writings; interviews; bibliography; Habermas explained, discussed, reviewed; the mailing list and other Habermas sites; updated 2004
• Habermas bibliography, online texts, news; updated weekly
• "Jürgen Habermas" in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
• A Marxist contribution to the critique of Jürgen Habermas-from World Socialist Website
• Jurgen Habermas, On Society and Politics
• Geoffrey Bennington offers an account of deconstruction for an audience familiar with Habermas (microsoft word file)
• Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention by Douglas Kellner