Jürgen Habermas, one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, dies

BarcelonaThe German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (Düsseldorf, 1929 – Stanberg, 2026) died this Saturday at the age of 96, according to a statement released by the publishing house Suhrkamp, ​​which quoted his family. Habermas, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and a member of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, began his career in the 1950s at the Institute for Social Research with Theodor W. Adorno. In 1961, he received his doctorate from Marburg with his dissertation. The structural transformation of the public sphere

After a few years at the University of Heidelberg, in 1964 he assumed the Max Horkheimer Chair of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt. His inaugural lecture in 1968 led to the publication of the book Knowledge and interest (1968). In 1986 he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), considered the highest distinction in German research. In 2003 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences. From 1971 to 1983 he was director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on the Living Conditions of the Scientific and Technological World. Among his best-known works are Theory of communicative actionwhich he published in two volumes in 1981. In this text, Habermas analyzes social interaction, tracing its origins to rituals and sacred elements, and argues that during modernity it is transformed through language. Based on his analysis of communication, the philosopher proposes a new idea of ​​reason: discursive reason. In 1983, Habermas returned to the University of Frankfurt as a professor of philosophy and sociology, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. Daniel Gamper, professor of political philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​attended Habermas's last seminar. "Habermas is probably the last great thinker who combined the stature of a leading German and European academic of his time, with countless structural works and scholarly studies, and, at the same time, was one of the great public intellectuals of his era," Gamper notes, "dealing with the most advanced social and political issues of the time."

Holocaust Awareness

Habermas's thought incorporates the testimony of Adorno, for whom the barbarity of the Third Reich challenged the very reason that had led humanity to build crematoria to optimize the extermination of the Jews. "Habermas does not accept this diagnosis and sets out to restore the key concept in the history of philosophy, which is reason, and he does so in the two volumes of his Theory of communicative action"He proposes a new kind of reason, one that is neither the subject's nor a transcendental reason, but rather the reasons we give each other, which allow us to understand one another and achieve some kind of objectivity," Gamper points out. "And in the face of relativistic postmodernism, Habermas maintains a universalist stance through this universal reason, yet one situated in time."

The German philosopher was a great defender of the European project and of the notion of the democratic state and citizenship as a remedy against the rise of nationalism and a safeguard against the fundamental totalitarianism of European democracies, especially from the second half of the 20th century onward. "He defended the idea of ​​constitutional patriotism, which Aznar and the Spanish right tried to appropriate, as if to say that they were constitutionalists and everyone else was a nationalist," Gamper notes. But Habermas's constitutional patriotism was based on the idea that national loyalties should be loyalties to established rights, to constitutions, and not to homelands or national sentiments. For him, European identity should not be based on cultural, linguistic, or national issues, but on respect for universal rights.

For Gamper, Habermas's death comes at a "symptomatic" moment of fragility for the European project, with the entry of the far right into the parliaments of many countries, including Germany. He believed that no leniency toward Germany's past should be tolerated, and that, therefore, it was necessary to intellectually combat what he called the right-wing radicals, to wield all arguments and prevent them from gaining any ground. And it seems that his passing also coincides with the beginning of the dissolution of the cordon sanitaire against the far right.

For years, Habermas had suffered from a speech impediment due to a congenital cleft palatial condition.