The philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, Germany’s most influential intellectualdied this Saturday at the age of 96 in Starnberg, the Bavarian city on the shores of the beautiful lake of the same name. He has been a very wide-ranging thinker, who approached from the student revolts of May 68 to practically all open public debates in his country and the rest of the Western world, be it the September 11 attacks against the United States or the influence of new technologies on human behavior.
On an academic scale, he is probably the philosopher who has generated the most doctoral theses, directly or indirectly related to his ‘Theory of communicative action’ and ‘Knowledge and Interest’his most notable works. On the level of the man on the street, he has been what in Germany is defined as a “critical thinker”, capable of influencing everything that worries or shakes the world.
He has won practically all the existing awards in his discipline, including the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2003 or the John J. Kluge of 2015, considered the unofficial Nobel Prize in Philosophy. Two years earlier, upon receiving the so-called Wisdom Cup or Kassel Civic Award in his country, he warned about the obligation of every democratic state of law to act with maximum transparency, included in the work of the secret services. He was alluding to the scandal unleashed then by the espionage work of the National Security Agency, the NSA, in the United States.
His ability to analyze and intervene in the public sphere is comparable to that of writers in Germany and until practically his death. Günter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensbergerdied in 2015 and 2022, respectively. The news of his death, confirmed by his editor at Suhrkamp, comes at a time when in Germany there is a feeling of “orphanhood” when it comes to moral issues.
From May 68 to “leftist fascism”
Born in 1929 in Düsseldorf, western Germany, Habermas is primarily associated with the last generation of the Frankfurt school of Theodor W. Adornowith whom he worked from 1956 in his emblematic Sociological Research Institute. Two years earlier he had obtained a doctorate from the University of Bonn, then the federal capital of Germany.
His role as a precursor of the student movements that generated the revolts of May 1968 is due to his time in Frankfurt. He distanced himself from the use of violence and even spoke of “leftist fascism”, which earned him criticism among those who had been his co-religionists in the circle of Rudi Dutschkethe charismatic leader of the revolts, victim of an attack in May 1968, the consequences of which caused his death in 1979.
German trauma analyst or AI
In the more than 50 books he has written he has confronted the great national traumas, from the German National Socialist past to the partition of the country between the four allied powers that defeated the Third Reich or its division into two halves – the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) -. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, he was confronted with the idea of a dominant capitalism and emerged from a dangerous euphoria. He also considered that there is no political horizon outside of capitalism, which of course did not please the most leftist currents.
“In terrorism, the fatal clash between two worlds is manifested,” he wrote, regarding the attacks of September 11, 2011. That he has continued to think and influence everything that shakes his contemporaries is demonstrated by his refusal in 2025 to Google will appropriate its name to call it “Habermas Machine” an AI tool. “You cannot delegate the resolution of human conflicts to a machine,” he warned.
Subscribe to continue reading
