Jürgen Habermas’s Search for Moral Justification

Jürgen Habermas’s Search for Moral Justification

The German philosopher and critical theorist Jürgen Habermas has died at the age of ninety-six. The tributes and encomia pour in and will continue to pour in. He deserves our respect if not necessarily our admiration or adherence.  Habermas was a fundamentally decent man who became considerably less ideological, and predictable, as the decades passed. The Marxism he inherited from his mentors in the Frankfurt School became less pronounced, less …

Jürgen Habermas Dies at 96

I first read Jürgen Habermas in a graduate school seminar—The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere—and I felt immense irritation. All this is just wrong! There’s all sorts of Marxist bibble-babble here and he doesn’t have his history right. Hmm, I could write an article correcting what he gets wrong. And a book … and […] The post The Passing of a Decent Man appeared first on Minding The Campus.

Habermas, democratic discourse, and class

Jürgen Habermas has died, at the age of 96, and traditional and social media are full of obituaries and memories. For outsiders, it is maybe hard to gauge the omnipresence of his name in West Germany,* but his influence on democratic theory more broadly speaking is well-known. When I entered university, people would mention it in the same in way in which Kant or Hegel were mentioned (full disclosure: I saw him a few times in person, but with no …

Refeudalizing reason: Habermas's journey from critique to complicity

Jürgen Habermas is dead. The most influential representative of the Frankfurt School’s second generation passed away on 14 March in Starnberg, Bavaria, at the age of 96, leaving behind one of the most towering, and, ultimately, most contradictory, intellectual legacies of the twentieth century. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier declared that the country had lost “a great Enlightenment thinker.” Chancellor Friedrich Merz said his “analytic…