(Redirected from Jurgen Habermas)
'Jürgen Habermas' (; born
June 18,
1929) is a
German philosopher and
sociologist in the tradition of
critical theory and American
pragmatism. He is best known for his work on the concept of the
public sphere, which he has based in his theory of
communicative action. His work has 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.
Biography
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. 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 ambivalence 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
Institute for Social Research at the
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, 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 is also a Permanent Visiting Professor at
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In
1988 he was elected as a member of
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
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. He received the 2005
Holberg International Memorial Prize (about € 520 000).
Teacher and mentor
Habermas is famous as a teacher and mentor. Among his most prominent students have been the political sociologist
Claus Offe (professor at the
Hertie School of Governance in Berlin) , the social philosopher Johann Arnason (professor at the La Trobe University and chief editor of the ''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.
Theory
Habermas has 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, and the
sociological systems theory of
Talcott Parsons and
Niklas Luhmann
★
Neo-Kantian thought
Jürgen 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. 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 "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
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 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. While Habermas concedes that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distanced himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it and much of
postmodernist thought for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and exaggerations.
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
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 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 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''.
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
France. It was this public sphere of rational debate on matters of political importance, made possible by the development of the
bourgeois culture centered around coffeehouses, intellectual and
literary salons, and the
print media that helped to make
parliamentary democracy possible and which promoted Enlightenment ideals of equality, human rights and justice. The public sphere was guided by a norm of rational argumentation and critical discussion in which the strength of one's argument was more important than one's identity.
According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the
bourgeois public sphere of the Enlightenment. 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.
In his
magnum opus ''
Theory of Communicative Action'' (1981) he criticized the one-sided process of modernization led by forces of economic and administrative rationalization. Habermas traced the growing intervention of formal systems in our everyday lives as parallel to development of the
welfare state,
corporate capitalism and the culture of
mass consumption. These reinforcing trends rationalize widening areas of public life, submitting them to a generalizing logic of efficiency and control. As routinized political parties and interest groups substitute for participatory democracy, society is increasingly administered at a level remote from input of citizens. As a result, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the
lifeworld are deteriorating. Democratic public life only thrives where institutions enable citizens to debate matters of public importance. He describes an
ideal type of "
ideal speech situation"
[1], where actors are equally endowed with the capacities of discourse, recognize each other's basic social equality and speech is undistorted by ideology or misrecognition.
Habermas is optimistic about the possibility of the revival of the public sphere. He sees hope for the future in the new era of political community that transcends the nation-state based on ethnic and cultural likeness for one based on the equal rights and obligations of legally vested citizens. This
discursive theory of democracy requires a political community which can collectively define its political will and implement it as policy at the level of the
legislative system. This
political system requires an activist public sphere, where matters of common interest and political issues can be discussed, and the force of public opinion can influence the decision-making process.
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.
Historians' Quarrel
Habermas is famous as a
public intellectual as well as a scholar; most notably, in the 1980s he used the
popular press to attack the German historians
Ernst Nolte,
Michael Stürmer, and
Andreas Hillgruber. He argued that they had tried to detach
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
Wehrmacht (German Army) during
World War II. The so-called ''
Historikerstreit'' ("Historians' Quarrel") was not at all one-sided, because Habermas was himself attacked by scholars like
Joachim Fest and
Klaus Hildebrand. More recently, Habermas has been outspoken in his opposition to the
American invasion of Iraq.
Habermas and Derrida
Habermas and
Jacques Derrida engaged in somewhat acrimonious disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual refusal to participate in extended debate and a tendency to talk past one another. Following Habermas' 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
postmodern thought, notably
Jean-François Lyotard, engaged in more extended polemics against Habermas, whereas
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe found these polemics counterproductive. In hindsight, these contentious exchanges contributed to divisions within
continental philosophy by focusing too heavily on a purported 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 be suggested that schematic terminology like "
poststructuralism", trafficked heavily in the United States but virtually unknown in France, found expression in Habermas' understanding of his French contemporaries, bringing with them the baggage of the "
culture wars" raging within American academic circles at the time. 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, "February 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe,” in ''Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe'' (Verso, 2005). 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.
Jürgen Habermas stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming that Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. According to Habermas, we continue to nourish ourselves from this source - there are no other options; everything else is just postmodern chatter.
[2]
Major works
★ ''
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere'' (1962)
★ ''Theory and Practice'' (1963)
★ ''On the Logic of the Social Sciences'' (1967)
★ ''Toward a Rational Society'' (1967)
★ ''Technology and Science as Ideology'' (1968)
★ ''Knowledge and Human Interests'' (1968)
★ ''
Legitimation Crisis'' (1973)
★ ''Communication and the Evolution of Society'' (1976)
★ ''On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction'' (1976)
★ ''
The Theory of Communicative Action'' (1981)
★ ''Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action'' (1983)
★ ''Philosophical-Political Profiles'' (1983)
★ ''The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity'' (1985)
★ ''The New Conservatism'' (1985)
★ ''Postmetaphysical Thinking'' (1988)
★ ''Justification and Application'' (1991)
★ ''
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy'' (1992)
★ ''On the Pragmatics of Communication'' (1992)
★ ''
The Inclusion of the Other'' (1996)
★ ''
A Berlin Republic'' (1997, collection of interviews with Habermas)
★ ''The Postnational Constellation'' (1998)
★ ''Rationality and Religion'' (1998)
★ ''Truth and Justification'' (1998)
★ ''The Future of Human Nature'' (2003)
★ ''The Divided West'' (2006)
References
★ Jürgen Habermas : a philosophical--political profile / [Martin Matuštík, http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~matustik/].
★ Postnational identity : critical theory and existential philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel /[Martin Matuštík, http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~matustik/].
★
Thomas McCarthy, ''The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas'', MIT Press, 1978.
:
★
Raymond Geuss, ''The Idea of a Critical Theory'', Cambridge University Press, 1981.
:
★ J.G. Finlayson, ''Habermas: A Very Short Introduction'', Oxford University Press, 2004.
:
★ Jane Braaten,
''Habermas's Critical Theory of Society'', State University of New York Press, 1991.
:
★ Erik Oddvar Eriksen and Jarle Weigard, ''Understanding Habermas: Communicative Action and Deliberative Democracy'', Continuum International Publishing, 2004 (ISBN 082647179X).
:
★ Detlef Horster. ''Habermas: An Introduction." Pennbridge, 1992 (ISBN 1-880055-01-5)
★
Martin Jay, ''Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas'' (Chapter 9), University of California Press, 1986. (ISBN 0-520-05742-2)
Footnotes
1. http://www.erz.uni-hannover.de/~horster/lit/habermas.pdf
Awards
★ In 2004, the Inamori Foundation in Japan awarded Habermas the
Kyoto Prize (50 million Yen).
★ In 2005, the Norwegian Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund awarded Habermas the €520.000 endowed
Holberg International Memorial Prize.
See also
★
''Brave New World'' argument
★
Communicative action
★
Constitutional patriotism
★
Constellations
★
The Foucault/Habermas debate
★
Performative contradiction
★
The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll
External links
★
Extensive article in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
★
Habermas Forum Online text by Jürgen Habermas, news, bibliography and biography (largely in German), updated weekly
★
Habermas at Northwestern University
★
scholarly e-mail discussion at Yahoo! Groups about, in light of, or related to Jürgen Habermas' work (in English)
★
Wikibook providing space for page-by-page analysis of the works of Jürgen Habermas
★
''Towards a United States of Europe'', by Jürgen Habermas, at signandsight.com, published March 27, 2006
★
''How to save the quality press?'' Habermas argues for state support for quality newspapers, at signandsight.com, published May 21, 2007
★
Habermas links collected by Antti Kauppinen (writings; interviews; bibliography; Habermas explained, discussed, reviewed; and other Habermas sites; ''updated 2004''
★
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
★
Habermasian Reflections blog
★
'Dear Habermas' academic journal
★
Democracy in the Age of Information: A Reconception of the Public Sphere by Denis Gaynor
★
Jurgen Habermas, On Society and Politics
★
The Jürgen Habermas Web Resource
★
Interview with Jurgen Habermas about the European Union (dpa, March 2007)
★
"Jürgen Habermas" in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
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