Bio: (1929-) German sociologist. Jürgen Habermas holds a Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt and has taught at the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt. He was director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Habermas' education and early works were heavily influenced by the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical theory.

In his first book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989, in German 1962), Habermas studies the change of the public sphere from the time of feudalism, through its various forms in civil society, and concludes with his presentation of the disintegration of the public sphere in the modern age. The public sphere refers to a free and open debate on social and political issues, which takes place in public. The beginning of the public sphere appears in the salons and taverns of large cities in Europe at the beginning of the modern age. The media, and especially the press, initially played a significant role in the emergence and development of the public sphere. However, over time, the state, the private sphere, and economic monopolies have merged, leading to the commercialization of the media and their abuse, in order to achieve the interests of specific classes or groups. All this caused a rapid decline of the public sphere and led to its "refeudalization". The decline of the public sphere caused the loss of individual freedom because the state and institutions gained supremacy over individuals.

In several books written in the mid-1960s, such as Theory and Practice (1973, in German 1963), Knowledge and Human Interest (1972, in German 1968a), Technology and Science as Ideology (in German 1968b), Habermas expresses his dissatisfaction with the dominance of the positivist approach in epistemology and methodology of the social sciences, had at that time. Habermas studies the relationship between types of knowledge and what he calls "a priori interests." Interests or fundamental orientations are related to the conditions of reproduction and the organization of humanity. There are three such fundamental interests: control (prediction), understanding, and emancipation. Each of these interests corresponds to a specific type of knowledge. Empirical analytical knowledge tends to fulfill the interest of control and prediction; hermeneutics serves the interest of understanding; while critical theory creates knowledge related to the interest of emancipation. The essence of Habermas's critique of positivism is that this approach recognizes legitimacy only to empirical analytical knowledge, and thus completely delegitimizes the other two types of knowledge. The critical theory seeks to achieve emancipation by combining empirical analytical and hermeneutical knowledge to remove existing social constraints.

In Legitimation Crisis (1975, in German 1973), Habermas combines the theoretical approach of Frankfurt's school of critical theory, on the one hand, and the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and functionalism of Talkot Parsons, on the other, to study the crisis of legitimacy in the modern capitalist society. Habermas approaches the crisis from the perspective of systems theory. Crises occur when the structure of a social system comes to have fewer opportunities for solving problems than what is needed to maintain the structure of the system. Crises of the system are a consequence of the state in which the structures, which are necessary to fulfill the imperatives of the system, come into contradiction with each other, which causes the loss of the identity of the system itself.

The most important imperative for maintaining the identity of the system is to achieve integration. Habermas distinguishes between two types of integration, social integration which takes place in the "lifeworld " and systemic integration which takes place within the "system". For Habermas, "legitimation" entails systems of ideas created by a political system, or any other system, to justify the existence of the system itself. In that sense, legitimation serves to achieve systems integration. In his book Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979, in German 1976), Habermas criticizes Marx because he focused entirely on the study of "goal rational action" and did not pay attention to symbolic, that is, "communicative action."

Habermas' most famous work is the two-volume book The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, in German 1981). In this book, he develops, in detail, his theoretical system, which he began to create in earlier works. Habermas introduces a distinction between two basic aspects of any society - "lifeworld" and "system". The lifeworld is a theoretical concept introduced to sociological theory by Alfred Schütz. The lifeworld is an area where symbolic communication takes place, or, as Habermas calls it, "communicative action", between people. Culture, personalities, meanings, and symbols are the basis of communication, that is, communicative action. Within the lifeworld, actors (people) strive to achieve a common understanding. That common understanding is a product, but also the direction of communication and practical activities of people. The realm of the lifeworld is the focus of Alfred Schütz's phenomenology and George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism, and it is precisely these theoretical approaches that Habermas uses to study this realm.

On the other hand, the "system" represents a completely different analytical level. In Habermas's terminology, "system" means what functionalism and systems theory call the social system. The system understood in this way has its own structure, and each part of that structure has the function of achieving a harmonious integration of the entire system. The integration of the system is achieved through the instrumental rationality of the actors. If we applied the terminology of Max Weber to Habermas's theory, then the integration of lifeworld would be achieved through the „value rational action“ of actors, and the integration of the system through the „goal rational action“ of actors. The lifeworld consists of societies, cultures, and personalities.

Communicative action achieves the reproduction of the lifeworld by maintaining culture, integrating society, and forming individual personalities. Communicative action contains both cognitive and normative elements, because knowledge and understanding between speakers are achieved through it, and social norms are also established. The communicative action should provide answers to the four most important questions: 1) what is understandable; 2) what is true; 3) what is right (in the ethical and moral sense); 4) whether the speaker really believes in what he is saying.

These four questions are ‘validity claims’, that is, qualities that every communication should possess: ‘intelligibility’, ‘truth’, ‘moral rightness’, and ‘sincerity’. The rationalization of the lifeworld happens when the best answers to these questions are achieved in an open discussion, and the basis of consensus is the strength of the arguments in the discussion. This ideal goal of communicative rationality Habermas calls the “ideal speech situation”, in which only the “force of the better argument” exist. The opposite situation is “systematically distorted communication”. Habermas believed that in modern society, the lifeworld achieves that ideal speech situation, which leads to greater differentiation between different elements of the lifeworld, that is, between society, culture, and personality.

The system is maintained through instrumental and strategic action, which, during social evolution, becomes increasingly more rationalized, which leads to progressive differentiation and increasing complexity of the system. During this evolution, individual subsystems become more and more self-sustaining and isolated, and, at the same time, the system itself becomes more and more separated from the lifeworld. In the modern age, the system is beginning to exercise increasing control over the lifeworld, and this process Habermas called "colonization of lifeworld". Although both the system and the lifeworld go through their own processes of rationalization (each of which has a separate and different internal logic), in the end, the system becomes the one that exercises increasing domination over the lifeworld.

This dominance becomes especially pronounced through two areas of the system - economy, and politics. In the field of economy, capitalism, through money, markets, and mass media, limits the possibilities of open public discussion. In the field of politics, a centralized and bureaucratized state has similar effects on the lifeworld. Thus, a pseudo-public sphere is created in which bureaucratically closed ways of communication dominate. Habermas views modernity as an unfinished project, and for that project to be realized, the system and the lifeworld must be reconnected into one harmonious dialectical relationship, where each sphere will mutually strengthen the other. New social movements are the best example and engine that will enable the realization of the potential that modernity has.

Habermas published a large number of books in which he applied the theory of communicative action to various fields: ethics (Justification and Application, 1991), law and democracy (Between Facts and Norms, 1992), ethnic relations (Postnational Constellation, 1997), secularization (The Dialectic of Secularization, 2005a), and the future of the European Union (Europe. The Faltering Project, 2009 and The Crisis of the European Union, 2012).

Main works

Student und Politik (1961);

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962);

Theorie und Praxis (1963);

Erkenntnis und Interesse (1968a);

Technik und Wissenschaft als „Ideologie“ (1968b);

Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (1973);

Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976);

Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981);

Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (1983);

Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985);

Nachmetaphysisches Denken (1988);

Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik (1991);

Faktizität und Geltung (1992);

Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik (1995);

Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (1996);

Die postnationale Konstellation (1998);

Dialektik der Säkularisierung (2005a);

Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion (2005b);

Ach, Europa (2008);

Zur Verfassung Europas (2011);

Nachmetaphysisches Denken II. Aufsätze und Repliken (2012);

Im Sog der Technokratie. Kleine politische Schriften XII (2013);

Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019).

Works translated into English:

Knowledge and Human Interest (1972, in German 1968a);

Theory and Practice (1973, in German 1963);

Legitimation Crisis (1975, in German 1973);

Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979, in German 1976);

The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, in German 1981);

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989, in German 1962);

Postmetaphysical Thinking: Between Metaphysics and the Critique of Reason (1992, in German 1988);

Justification and Application (1993, in German 1991);

Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity (2002);

The Dialectic of Secularization (2007, in German 2005a);

Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (2008, in German 2005);

Europe. The Faltering Project (2009, in German 2008);

The Crisis of the European Union (2012, in German 2011);

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (2015, in German 1992);

The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (2015, in German 1998);

The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian's Debate (2015);

Postmetaphysical Thinking II (2017, in German 2013);

Philosophical Introductions: Five Approaches to Communicative Reason (2018);

Year 30: Germany's Second Chance (2020, in German 2020).