He was regarded as one of Germany's most influential contemporary philosophers. Jürgen Habermas has now died in the Bavarian town of Starnberg, aged 95.
One of Germany's most influential postwar philosophers Jürgen Habermas died at the age of 96 on Saturday, according to his publishing house, Suhrkamp.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Habermas' work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the most important contemporary German philosophers and a leading figure at the Frankfurt School, besides Marxist thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
The philosopher made an international name for himself for reworking the famous "Critical Theory" developed by Adorno and Horkheimer, a theory that analyses society, politics and culture and often calls into question existing power structures, ideologies and relations of domination.
Habermas was the last surviving representative of the Frankfurt School and spoke out on current political issues for as long as he could.
His best-known works included the two-volume "Theory of Communicative Action," published in 1981.
Habermas was born in Düsseldorf in 1929 and had been enrolled in the Hitler Youth at a young age, as did many German boys, but soon became deeply marked by the collapse of Nazism when he was 15 years old.
He later recalled that the Nazi atrocities were a formative moment that ultimately guided him toward philosophy and social theory, recalling that "you saw suddenly that it was a politically criminal system in which you had lived".
The philosopher had an ambivalent relationship with the German left-wing student movement in the 1960s. While he engaged with it, he rejected any radicalisation and the use of violence, as well as warned against the danger of what he called “left-wing fascism".
Later, however, he acknowledged that the movement had contributed to a "fundamental liberalisation" of German society.
Habermas was born with a cleft palate and had corrective surgery several times as a child. He later said the experience helped shape his thinking about language.
His wife, Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft, died last year. The couple had three children: Tilmann; Rebekka, who died in 2023; and Judith.