Habermas biography

Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929, Düsseldorf, Germany) is widely regarded as one of the most important European philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the continent’s leading contemporary public intellectual.

A highly influential social and political thinker, Habermas is generally identified with critical social theory, a Marxist inspired movement that emerged in the 1920s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany—also known as “the Frankfurt School.” Habermas belongs to the second generation of the Frankfurt School, following first-generation and founding figures such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.

Habermas’s theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibilities of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests—an idea that Habermas popularized as “communicative rationality.”

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