Jürgen Habermas

About the author

Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026) was one of the most influential German philosophers of the twentieth century, working in the traditions of critical theory and pragmatism. Associated with the Frankfurt School, he held professorships at Heidelberg and Goethe University Frankfurt and directed the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg. His landmark works — The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) — argued that rationality is grounded in open, honest communication rather than strategic self-interest.

He famously defended the Enlightenment as an "unfinished project" and intervened as a public intellectual in the 1986 Historikerstreit, challenging conservative attempts to relativize the Holocaust.