Heir to the Frankfurt School, where he was an assistant to Theodor Adorno, he preferred to bet that reason, far from being lost, could be recovered through dialogue.
German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermasone of the main thinkers on democracy and the “public sphere”, died this Saturday14, at 96 years old. Thereinformation has been confirmed by its publisherSuhrkamp.
He passed away at his residence in Starnbergon the outskirts of Munich, Germany. The cause of death has not been confirmed.
Habermas was born on June 18, 1929in Düsseldorf. From 1949 to 1954 he studied philosophy, history, psychology, German literature and economics in Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn.
He taught, among other institutions, at the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt am Main, as well as at the University of California, Berkeley, and was director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Living Conditions in the Scientific-Technical World, in Starnberg.
Jürgen Habermas received numerous honorary doctorates and awardsincluding the Peace Prize of the German Book Industry (2001) and the Kyoto Prize (2004).
The ‘public sphere’
Habermas dedicated his life to the study of democracyespecially through its theories about communicative rationality and the public sphere, being considered one of the most important contemporary intellectuals.
Heir to the Frankfurt School – where he was assistant to Theodor Adorno -, he was not content to inherit the pessimism of his predecessors in the face of modernity. He preferred to bet that reason, far from being lost, could be recovered through dialogue.
This bet took shape in his work Theory of Communicative Acting (1981). There, Habermas distinguishes strategic action, guided by individual objectives, without openness to other people’s arguments, from communicative action, in which there is a space for genuine dialogue, in which we think collectively about what objectives a society should pursue.
From this distinction came the core of his political philosophy: the idea that democratic legitimacy comes neither from force nor from the market, but from the understanding reached between free and equal people.
From communicative action, Habermas developed the concept of deliberative politicscreating a synthesis between liberalism and republicanism: a reconciliation between private and public autonomy, between human rights and popular sovereignty. For him, there was no contradiction between being free individually and actively participating in collective life; on the contrary, one depended on the other.
This vision gained institutional contours in Law and Democracy: Between Facticity and Validity (1992), a work in which Habermas sought to give practical consequences to the claims of his theory of communicative action as a response to the problem of social integration in the context of post-traditional societies.
The public sphere, an informal space for debate that ranges from everyday conversations to political demonstrations, was, for him, the central normative category of the deliberative political process: an intermediate structure that mediates between the State and the private sectors of the world of life.
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