Jurgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.
Habermas’ publisher, Suhrkamp, said he died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich.
Habermas frequently weighed in on political matters over several decades. His extensive writing crossed the boundaries of academic and philosophical disciplines, providing a vision of modern society and social interaction. His best-known works included the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action.
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Habermas, who was 15 at the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, later recalled the dawn of a new era in 1945 and his coming to terms with the reality of Nazi crimes as something without which he would not have found his way into philosophy and social theory. He said that “you saw suddenly that it was a politically criminal system in which you had lived.”
He had an ambivalent relationship with the left-wing student movement of the late 1960s in Germany and beyond, engaging with it, but also warning at the time against the danger of what he called “left-wing fascism” — a reaction to a firebrand speech by a student leader that he later said was “slightly out of place.”
He would later recognize the movement as having driven a “fundamental liberalization” of German society.
In the 1980s, Habermas was a prominent figure in the so-called Historians’ Dispute, in which Berlin historian Ernst Nolte and others called for a new perspective on the Third Reich and German identity. They tended to compare what happened under Adolf Hitler to atrocities carried out by other governments, such as the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Habermas and other opponents contended that the conservative historians were trying to lessen the magnitude of Nazi crimes through such comparisons.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that “Germany and Europe have lost one of the most significant thinkers of our time.”
Germany’s center-right leader said that “his sociological and philosophical work had an impact on generations of researchers and thinkers.”
Merz praised “Habermas’ intellectual forcefulness and his liberality” and said in a statement that “his voice will be missed.”
Habermas supported the rise to power of center-left former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder in 1998. He was critical of the “technocratic” approach and perceived lack of political vision of Schroder’s conservative successor, Angela Merkel, complaining in 2016 of the paralyzing effects on public opinion of “the foam blanket of Merkel’s policy of sending people to sleep.”
He was particularly critical of the “limited interest” shown by German politicians, business leaders and media in “shaping a politically effective Europe.”
In 2017, he praised newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron for laying out of plans for European reform, saying that “the way he speaks about Europe makes a difference.”
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