Philosophy and social theory of Jürgen Habermas

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas showed how modern European salons, cafés, and literary groups contain the resources for democratizing the public sphere. In his 1965 inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University, “Erkenntnis und Interesse” (1965; “Knowledge and Human Interests”), and in the book of the same title published three years later, Habermas set forth the foundations of a normative version of critical social theory, the Marxist social theory developed by Horkheimer, Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt Institute from the 1920s onward. He did this on the basis of a general theory of human interests, according to which different areas of human knowledge and inquiry—e.g., the physical, biological, and social sciences—are expressions of distinct, but equally basic, human interests. These basic interests are in turn unified by reason’s overarching pursuit of its own freedom, which is expressed in scholarly disciplines that are critical of unfree modes of social life. In his rethinking of the foundations of early critical social theory, Habermas sought to unite the philosophical traditions of Karl Marx and German idealism with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the pragmatism of the American logician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Habermas took a linguistic-communicative turn in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981; The Theory of Communicative Action). Drawing on the work of analytic (Anglo-American) philosophers (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin), Continental philosophers (Horkheimer, Adorno, Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alfred Schutz, and György Lukács), pragmatists (Peirce and G.H. Mead), and sociologists (Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and Niklas Luhmann), he argued that human interaction in one of its fundamental forms is “communicative” rather than “strategic” in nature, insofar as it is aimed at mutual understanding and agreement rather than at the achievement of the self-interested goals of individuals. Such understanding and agreement, however, are possible only to the extent that the communicative interaction in which individuals take part resists all forms of nonrational coercion. The notion of an “ideal communication community” functions as a guide that can be formally applied both to regulate and to critique concrete speech situations. Using this regulative and critical ideal, individuals would be able to raise, accept, or reject each other’s claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity solely on the basis of the “unforced force” of the better argument—i.e., on the basis of reason and evidence—and all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain mutual understanding. Although the ideal communication community is never perfectly realized (which is why Habermas appeals to it as a regulative or critical ideal rather than as a concrete historical community), the projected horizon of unconstrained communicative action within it can serve as a model of free and open public discussion within liberal-democratic societies. Likewise, this type of regulative and critical ideal can serve as a justification of deliberative liberal-democratic political institutions, because it is only within such institutions that unconstrained communicative action is possible.

Liberal democracy is not a guarantee that communicative rationality will flourish, however. Indeed, in modern capitalist societies, social institutions that ideally should be communicative in character—e.g., family, politics, and education—have come to embody a merely “strategic” rationality, according to Habermas. Such institutions are increasingly overrun by economic and bureaucratic forces that are guided not by an ideal of mutual understanding but rather by principles of administrative power and economic efficiency.

Habermas’s findings carried wide-ranging normative implications. In Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (1983; Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action), he elaborated a general theory of “discourse ethics,” or “communicative ethics,” which concerns the ethical presuppositions of ideal communication that would have to be invoked in an ideal communication community. In a series of lectures published as  Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Habermas defended from postmodern criticism the Enlightenment ideal of normative rationality and specifically the ideal that unconstrained communication is guided by reasons that can be rejected or redeemed by speakers and hearers as true, right, or sincere.

Habermas was criticized by both the postmodern left and the neoconservative right for his trust in the power of rational discussion to resolve major domestic and international conflicts. While some critics found his normative critical theory—as applied to areas such as education, morality, and law—to be dangerously Eurocentric, others decried its utopian, radically democratic, or left-liberal character. He was criticized by Marxists and by feminist and race theorists for abandoning socialism or for allegedly giving up on vigorous criticism of social injustice and oppression. For some representatives of antiglobalization social movements, even Habermas’s left-leaning political liberalism and deliberative democratic reformism were inadequate to address the cultural, political, and economic distortions evident in existing democratic institutions. Habermas responded to critics at both ends of the political spectrum by developing a more robust communicative theory of democracy, law, and constitutions in Faktizität und Geltung (1992; Between Facts and Norms), Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (1996; The Inclusion of the Other), and Die postnationale Konstellation (1998; The Postnational Constitution). In Zeit der Ubergänge (2001; Time of Transitions), he offered global democratic alternatives to wars that employ terrorism as well as to the “war on terrorism.”

Among Habermas’s most lasting preoccupations were existential questions of religion, rationality, and “postsecular constellations,” a term that refers to the continued coexistence in the present age of secular and religious, cosmopolitan and ethnic, and Enlightenment and traditional worldviews. From the postwar years onward, Habermas engaged with a variety of thinkers who were preoccupied with the theme of hope against hope: existentialists such as Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre, Christian political theologians such as Johann Baptist Metz and Jürgen Moltmann, and Jewish thinkers Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Habermas returned to such issues in the early 21st century in Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur (2001; The Future of Human Nature), Glauben und Wissen (2001; “Faith and Knowledge”), Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity (2002), and other works.

Habermas was the recipient of numerous honours, including the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1980), the Kyoto Prize (2004), the Erasmus Prize (2013), and the John W. Kluge Prize (2015).