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Jurgen Habermas
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Jurgen Habermas is the most renowned living German philosopher. This book aims to give a clear and readable overview of his philosophical work. It analyzes both the theoretical underpinnings of Habermas's social theory, and its more concrete applications in the fields of ethics, politics, and law. It examines how Habermas's social and political theory informs his writing on real, current political and social problems. The author explores Habermas's influence on a wide variety of fields--including philosophy, political and social theory, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies.
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Jurgen Habermas is the most well known theorist of the second generation of critical social theory. Habermas has extended and revised the theory of the first generation especially through his theory of communicative action, which attempts to maintain the critical approach to the conditions of contemporary societies
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The interview with Jurgen Habermas has less to offer in terms of insights into the significance of 9/11 and its consequences. His theory of ‘communicative action’ is about giving foundations to ethics and politics through argumentative procedures, based on the idea that commitments to truth, sincerity and rightness are normative presuppositions of human communication. Philosophy's aim is to reconstruct the conditions that make communication not only possible, but ... effective and productive. This enables philosophy to become a critical tool to criticize the distortions in communication. For Habermas, international terrorism and 9/11 are ultimately a result of a communicative pathology: "The spiral of violence begins as a spiral of distorted communication that leads through the spiral of uncontrolled reciprocal mistrust to the breakdown of communication."
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Like the postmodernists, Jurgen Habermas hopes to create a dialogue which occurs outside of the realm of government and the economy. But Habermas' public sphere model attempts to thwart postmodern, chaotic dissipation by reinstalling Enlightenment values of reason and freedom into a modern discourse which aims at pragmatic consensus. In the public sphere, Habermas says, discourse becomes democratic through the "non-coercively unifying, consensus building force of a discourse in which participants overcome their at first subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement (Public Discourse 315)." By looking to rationality, he hopes to produce democratic judgements which can have universal application while remaining anchored within the practical realm of discourse among individuals.
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The public sphere in Jurgen Habermas’ original use of the term refers to the arena of discursive interaction that arose in bourgeois society of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, France and Germany. More than four decades after the original publication of Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), and sixteen years since its translation into English, the concept of the “public sphere” remains central, albeit controversial, to contemporary accounts of the sociological conditions necessary for the growth of a democratic polity. According to Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere developed in tandem with the rise of the modern state and with the growth of capitalist economies. For him, this public sphere provided a forum distinct from both the state and official economic activity - a space apart where citizens could participate politically in their community through rational-critical discourse.
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Jurgen Habermas was born in 1929 in Germany. Having seen the horrors of Nazism in World War 2, he entered academia and became a "second-generation" member of the circle of political philosophers known as the Frankfurt School. Other members of this circle included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. The Frankfurt School originated in studies of Marxism, but this doesn't make them Communists by a long chalk. Rather, they were interested in why Communism, as practiced by the Soviet Union before WWII, had failed to bring about the freedom from capitalism, consumerism, alienation, environmental crisis and so on that it was supposed to. Indeed, Communism had merely replaced capitalism with something far more dominating, repressive and controlling.
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Jurgen Habermas