Habermas in the public sphere

This book follows postwar Germany's leading philosopher and social thinker, Jürgen Habermas, through four decades of political and constitutional struggle over the shape of liberal democracy in Germany. Habermas's most influential theories-of the public sphere, communicative action, and modernity-were decisively shaped by major West German political events: the failure to denazify the judiciary, the rise of a powerful constitutional court, student rebellions in the late 1960s, the changing fortunes of the Social Democratic Party, NATO's decision to station nuclear weapons in Germany, and the unexpected collapse of East Germany. In turn, Habermas's writings on state, law, and constitution played a critical role in reorienting German political thought and culture toward a progressive liberal-democratic model. Matthew G. Specter uniquely illuminates the interrelationship between the thinker and his culture.

u ̈rgen Habermas (b. 1929) has for decades been recognized as a leading European philosopher and public intellectual. But his global visibility has obscured his rootedness in German political culture and debate. The most successful historical accounts of the transformation of political culture in West Germany have turned on the concept of German statism and its decline. Viewing Habermas through this lens, I treat Habermas as a radical critic of German statism and an innovative theorist of democratic constitutionalism. Based on personal interviews with Habermas and his German colleagues, and by setting the major work alongside his occasion-specific political writings from 1984 to 1996, I interpret Habermas’s political thought as an evolving response to two distinct moments in German history: first, the mid-1980s, and second, the revolutions of 1989 and German reunification in 1990. This essay challenges the dominant interpretations of Habermas’s mature statement of his political theory. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Democracy (1992), which have described it as marking a distinct break with, and reversal of, the commitments of his earlier work. By contrast, I describe the work as an intellectual summa, consistent with Habermas’s previous thought and career, and containing remarkable historical interpretations of two intertwined phenomena: the intellectual and institutional dimensions of the Bonn Republic and Habermas’s own biography.

Heathwood Press, 2014

In a previous piece on the Heathwood website, we argued that Frankfurt School critical theory falls into two distinct periods. 1 In the first, which runs from the 1920s until the 1970s, the School's writings remain challenging and forward-looking and inspirational. In the second, during which Habermas and (following Habermas) Honneth are the main figures, Frankfurt School theorising loses its critical and revolutionary edge. In the present contribution, we add detail to these generalisations.

The Encyclopedia of Political Thought

Theory and Society, 1974

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023

Jürgen Habermas is one of the leading social theorists and philosophers of the post-Second World War period in Germany, Europe, and the US, a prodigiously productive journalist, and a high-profile public intellectual who was at the forefront of the liberalization of German political culture. He is often labelled a second-generation Frankfurt School theorist, though his association with the Frankfurt School is only one of a rather complex set of allegiances and influences, and can be misconstrued. This entry will begin with a summary of Habermas's background and early and transitional works, including his influential concept of the public sphere, before moving on to discuss in detail his three major philosophical projects: his social theory, discourse theory of morality (or "discourse ethics"), and discourse theory of law and democracy. It will then more briefly address Habermas's methodology and philosophical framework (rational reconstruction and postmetaphysical thinking), his applied political theory, focusing on issues of national identity and international law, and finally his recent work on religion.

Political Theory, 1980

Jiirgen Habermas may be, as a recent commentator asserted, the dominant intellectual figure in contemporary Germany. But in the last decade, the works of Habermas have found a receptive audience in the English-speaking world as well. Building upon the insights of Marxist social theory, Continental hermeneutic phenomenology, and Anglo-American linguistic philosophy, Habermas has attempted to construct a comprehensive critical theory of society. As a result, his work has broad implications for the entire range of humanities and social sciences. Habermas' theories are now the object of critical discussions in political theory, sociology, philosophy, education, social psychology, and speech communication. Because Habermas's project touches such a variety of disciplines, his own writing and critical discussions of it are spread throughout a disparate array of professional books and journals. Consequently, a reader wishing to comprehend Habermas' thought and its influence has faced a difficult task in locating all relevant materials. This problem was partially erased by Thomas McCarthy, TIre Critical Theory of Jiirgen Hubennus (Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 1978), pp. 441-445, who provided a fairly thorough listing of Habermas' books and articles in German and English. The present bibliography is intended to remedy the problem completely by cataloging the critical treatments and extensions of his work which have appeared in Europe, North America, and elsewhere since 1964. Included here are books, book chapters, articles, dissertations, conference papers, and book reviews in

Habermas and the public sphere I edited by Craig Calhoun. Thomas McCarthy p. cm.-(Studies in contemporary German social thought) Includes bibliographical references and index.

SAGE Publications, 2015

The aim of this study is to discern intersections between the intellectual path of the young Habermas and the issues addressed by the Positivismusstreit, the dispute between Popper and Adorno about methodology in the social sciences. I will present two perspectives, focusing on different temporal moments and interpretative problems. First, I will investigate the young Habermas’ relationship to the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School: his views on philosophy and the social sciences, normative bases of critical theory and political attitudes. Second, I will reconstruct Habermas’ contemplation of the Positivismusstreit, in light of his social scientific research programme in the 1960s. The thesis supported is that Habermas developed a position diverging from those of Adorno and Horkheimer, and that his position reasserted the agenda of the ‘first critical theory’. This article highlight the discontinuity between the first and the second generation of the Frankfurt School, the constructive openness to other philosophical and sociological traditions, as well as the aporias of a theory of knowledge not yet oriented towards the programme of reconstructive sciences