Jurgen Habermas: A Practical Sense Sociologist and a Kantian Moralist in a Nutshell

Introduction

Post World War II Germany was facing enormous problems caused by its immediate past: psychological, economical, social, political, moral. In addition it had to deal with an awkward situation of the country being split artificially into two diametrically different republics. It had to cope with its heritage and recent past and find a way out of the impasse to be able to function in the modern and increasingly integrated world. Habermas’s intellectual career reflects these problems, political climate, and tensions; his own views are a testimony to how people can seek various solutions to intricate issues. In fact he became an intellectual conscience of Germany. He wrote prolifically on almost every aspect of public life and inspired the democratic movement.
Habermas was born in 1929 in Düsserldorf in a German family that uncritically accepted the Nazi reality without actively participating in the political process. He joined in 1945, as many other German youths, the Hitler jugend, the Nazi youth movement. After the war he became completely disillusioned with the Nazi past when he learned the extent of moral catastrophe perpetrated by the Nazis, especially by their attempt at eliminating ethnic and social groups they considered undesirable. Habermas studied philosophy in Göttingen, Zurich, and Bonn and obtained his doctoral degree in 1954 for his studies on the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling. He joined the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt where he became a research assistant to Theodore W. Adorno (1903-1969). He was influenced by Adorno and by Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), both of whom were of Jewish origin. In such a context Habermas discovered his own identity as belonging to German tradition viewed, however, from a critical distance. He was, for example enthusiastic about Martin Heidegger, but quickly turned away from him as well as from Konrad Adenauer’s regime which, according to him, did not acknowledge the break with the German immediate past. Habermas developed a certain sympathetic attitude toward Marx and the Marxist movement and because of it he was forced to leave the Frankfurt Institute and move to the University of Marburg where he received his habilitation in 1961. Since 1964 he worked as a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt until his retirement in 1994 with a break between 1971 and 1983 when he became a director of the Max Planck Institute in Stanberg.
Habermas was always responding to the pressing current issues of society. In the 1960’s he initially supported the student movement, but quickly became disappointed by their radical policies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany he criticized the way the process was done. In the 1990’s he studied American democracy and American liberal constitutional traditions and valued the appropriation of the Western democratic traditions by Germany, though he remains in his methodological approach a strong critic of both capitalism and liberalism. On the political level he advocated a “constitutional patriotism” as a form of identification with one’s now traditions:

The political culture of a country crystallizes around its constitution. Each national culture develops a distinctive interpretation of those constitutional principles… such as popular sovereignty and human rights – in the light of its own national history. A “constitutional patriotism” based on these interpretations can take the place originally occupied by nationalism.

Habermas belongs to the second generation of the Frankfurt School of theorists and follows the pragmatic American tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and John Dewey (1859-1952).

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