Jurgen Habermas

(born June 18, 1929) is a German
philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical
theory and American pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for
his work on the concept of the public sphere, the topic (and
title) of his first book. His work focused on the
foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis
of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule
of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and
contemporary politics—particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the
possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical
communication latent in modern institutions and in the human
capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.
Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Until his graduation from gymnasium, Habermas lived in
Gummersbach, near Cologne. His father, Ernst Habermas, was
executive director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and
Commerce, and was described by Habermas as a Nazi
sympathizer. He was brought up in a staunchly Protestant
milieu, his grandfather being the director of the seminary
in Gummersbach. He studied at the universities of Göttingen
(1949/50), Zürich (1950/51), and Bonn (1951–54) and earned a
doctorate in philosophy[1] from Bonn in 1954 with a
dissertation entitled, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von
der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken ("The absolute and
history: on the contradiction in Schelling's thought"). His
dissertation committee included Erich Rothacker and Oskar
Becker.
From 1956 on, he studied philosophy and sociology under
the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at
the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Institute for Social Research, but because of a rift between
the two over his dissertation—Horkheimer had made
unacceptable demands for revision—as well as his own belief
that the Frankfurt School had become paralyzed with
political skepticism and disdain for modern culture—he
finished his habilitation in political science at the
University of Marburg under the Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth.
His habilitation work was entitled, Strukturwandel der
Öffentlichkeit; Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der
Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (published in English translation
in 1989 as The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society). In
1961, he became a privatdozent in Marburg, and—in a move
that was highly unusual for the German academic scene of
that time—he was offered the position of "extraordinary
professor" (professor without chair) of philosophy at the
University of Heidelberg (at the instigation of Hans-Georg
Gadamer and Karl Löwith) in 1962, which he accepted. 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. He also
holds the uncharacteristically postmodern position of
"Permanent Visiting" Professor at Northwestern University in
Evanston, Illinois, and "Theodor Heuss Professor" at The New
School, New York.
Habermas was awarded The Prince of Asturias Award in
Social Sciences of 2003. 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. He received the 2005 Holberg
International Memorial Prize (about € 520,000).
Habermas was famous as a teacher and mentor. Among his most
prominent students were the pragmatic philosopher Herbert
Schnädelbach (theorist of discourse distinction and
rationality), the political sociologist Claus Offe
(professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin) ,
the social philosopher Johann Arnason (professor at La Trobe
University and chief editor of the journal Thesis Eleven),
the sociological theorist Hans Joas (professor at the
University of Erfurt 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), the American philosopher
Thomas McCarthy, the co-creator of mindful inquiry in social
research Jeremy J. Shapiro, and the assassinated Serbian
prime minister Zoran Đinđić.
Habermas constructed a comprehensive framework of social
theory and philosophy drawing on a number of intellectual
traditions:
the German philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant,
Friedrich Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund
Husserl, and Hans-Georg Gadamer
the Marxian tradition — both the theory of Karl Marx himself
as well as the critical neo-Marxian theory of the Frankfurt
School, i.e. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert
Marcuse
the sociological theories of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and
George Herbert Mead
the linguistic philosophy and speech act theories of Ludwig
Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Stephen Toulmin
and John Searle
the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence
Kohlberg
the American pragmatist tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce
and John Dewey
the sociological social systems theory of Talcott Parsons
and Niklas Luhmann
Neo-Kantian thought
Jürgen Habermas considered his major achievement to be 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. This social theory advances
the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an
inclusive universalist moral framework. This framework rests
on the argument called universal pragmatics - that all
speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for
"end") — 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 Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin,
and John Searle, the sociological theory of the
interactional constitution of mind and self of George
Herbert Mead, the theories of moral development of Jean
Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of
his Heidelberg colleague Karl-Otto Apel.
He carried 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. While Habermas conceded
that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argued
it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In
this he distanced himself from the Frankfurt School,
criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought,
for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and
exaggerations.
Within sociology, Habermas's major contribution was 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 included 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 modernity 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 saw 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 believed communicative
competence has developed through the course of evolution,
but in contemporary society it is often 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 introduces the concept of “reconstructive
science” with a double purpose: to place the “general theory
of society” between philosophy and social science and
re-establish the rift between the “great theorization” and
the “empirical research”. The model of “rational
reconstructions” represents the main thread of the surveys
about the “structures” of the world of life (“culture”,
“society” and “personality”) and their respective
“functions” (cultural reproductions, social integrations and
socialization). For this purpose, the dialectics between
“symbolic representation” of “the structures subordinated to
all worlds of life” (“internal relationships”) and the
“material reproduction” of the social systems in their
complex (“external relationships” between social systems and
environment) has to be considered. This model finds an
application, above all, in the “theory of the social
evolution”, starting from the reconstruction of the
necessary conditions for a phylogeny of the socio-cultural
life forms (the “hominization”) until an analysis of the
development of “social formations”, which Habermas
subdivides into primitive, traditional, modern and
contemporary formations. This paper is an attempt,
primarily, to formalize the model of “reconstruction of the
logic of development” of “social formations” summed up by
Habermas through the differentiation between vital world and
social systems (and, within them, through the
“rationalization of the world of life” and the “growth in
complexity of the social systems”). Secondly, it tries to
offer some methodological clarifications about the
“explanation of the dynamics” of “historical processes” and,
in particular, about the “theoretical meaning” of the
evolutional theory’s propositions. Even if the German
sociologist considers that the “ex-post rational
reconstructions” and “the models system/environment” cannot
have a complete “historiographical application”, these
certainly act as a general premise in the argumentative
structure of the “historical explanation”.