Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas (born in 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany) is one of the most important philosophers and social theorists in the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. He is usually considered to be the leading figure in the second generation of the Frankfurt School, an influential group of critical scholars associated with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Habermas’s work is particularly relevant for the field of media and communication studies because of several major contributions that have put media and public communication at the center of his social theory and social critique. He is probably best known internationally for two central concepts, the “public sphere” and “communicative action.” These concepts lie at the heart of two of his most widely cited works, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and his opus magnum The Theory of Communicative Action. Media and communication also feature prominently in Between Facts and Norms and, more recently, in A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics. Habermas has updated his conception of mediated communication by embedding it in his normative theory of deliberative democracy, which is predicated on the public exchange of ideas and sees democracy essentially as a collective learning process. According to Habermas, therefore, public debates about matters of collective importance constitute the fundamental mechanism through which democracy comes to life. Beyond his academic work, Habermas is known for his influential interventions in public debates on topics ranging from what he perceived as a dangerous revisionist tendency in dealing with Germany’s Nazi past (which he vehemently opposed) to the project of a united Europe (which he wants to develop into a transnational democracy sui generis). Such interventions have made him one of the most well-known public intellectuals in Germany and internationally.