Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher and sociologist, dies aged 96 | Germany
Influential German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas has died at the age of 96, his publisher said.
A key figure in the intellectual history of post-war Germany, Habermas is best known for his theory of political consensus building. Widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, he also helped shape the discourse around European integration and the formation of the EU.
Despite his background in the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school and his reputation as the court philosopher of the Social Democratic party, his influence transcended party boundaries. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the conservative Christian Democratic Union described him as “one of the most important thinkers of our time”.
“His analytical mind has shaped democratic discourse far beyond our country’s borders and served as a guide in the stormy sea,” Merz said in a statement. he said. “His voice will be missed”
Habermas’s career spanned seven decades and focused on the foundations of social theory, democracy, and the rule of law.
His belief that shaping public opinion is vital for the survival of democracies explains why Habermas continued to write books and newspaper articles well into his old age. In a 2015 interview with the Guardian, he criticized then-Chancellor Angela Merkel for “gambling away” Germany’s post-war reputation with her government’s hard-line stance during the debt crisis in Greece.
Recently such interventions have led to criticism from young intellectuals. In 2022, Germany’s Green Party criticized foreign minister Annalena Baerbock for her “aggressively self-confident” and “shrill” condemnations of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Israel’s statement that the war it waged against Gaza after the October 7 Hamas attacks was “justified in principle” was met with disbelief by many philosophers who followed the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt school and published a condemning letter.
His most recent work, What It Takes to Get Better, was published in December last year. In it, he refused to “let defeat have the final say”, arguing that it was possible to “aggressively confront and ultimately overcome the crises of our day”.
He died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich, his publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, said. Two of their three children survived.
Born into a bourgeois family in Düsseldorf on June 18, 1929, Habermas underwent two surgeries after birth and in early childhood for a cleft palate that caused a speech impediment.
It is stated that this obstacle often affects their communication work. Habermas said that he experienced the importance of spoken language as “a common ground without which we cannot exist as individuals” and recalled struggling to make himself understood.
He grew up in a staunchly Protestant family. Habermas said his father, an economist who headed the local chamber of commerce, joined the Nazi party in 1933 but was no more than a “passive sympathizer.” Like most German children of the time, he joined the Hitler Youth at the age of 10. At the age of 15, as World War II was drawing to a close, he managed to avoid the draft by hiding from the military police.
He later said that if he had not experienced confronting the reality of Nazi crimes as a young man, he would not have found his way into philosophy and social theory. “Suddenly you saw that what you were living in was a system that was politically criminal,” he recalled.
He studied at the University of Bonn, where he met his wife Ute, and first came to prominence as a journalist and academic in the 1950s. He belonged to the second generation of the Frankfurt intellectual school, following in the footsteps of Marxist thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
Habermas was one of the leading figures in politics in the 1980s. historianstreitor historians’ dispute, an intellectual debate in which conservative historians, especially Ernst Nolte, argue that the atrocities in Nazi Germany were not unique and that similar crimes were committed by other governments.
Habermas and other opponents of this perspective have argued that conservative historians attempt to reduce the extent of Nazi crimes through such comparisons.
Arguing for the uniqueness of Third Reich atrocities, Habermas believed that: Vergangenheitsbewältigungor coming to terms with the past should have been at the center of Germany’s identity.
His wife, Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft, died last year. The couple had three children: Tilmann, Judith and Rebekka, who died in 2023.
