Acclaimed 20th century philosopher Jürgen Habermas dies at 96

The German philosopher and influential thinker on modernity and democracy Jürgen Habermas died Saturday in Starnberg, Germany at the age of 96.

Habermas’ death was confirmed in a statement on the website of his Berlin-based publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag.

“His work, published by Suhrkamp since the 1960s and translated into more than 40 languages, continues to resonate worldwide,” said the head of the publishing house, Jonathan Landgrebe, in the statement. “We mourn the loss of a significant philosopher, ever-present advisor, and dear friend.”

For more than 60 years, Habermas helped shape the political discourse in Germany, particularly during the postwar and post-reunification eras.

He was perhaps best known for introducing the concept of the “public sphere” – a space for public discourse beyond state control, and therefore essential to a healthy democracy.

“Germany and Europe have lost one of the most significant thinkers of our time,” noted German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Habermas shot to prominence in the mid-20th century as a member of the Frankfurt School, which was critical of capitalism, fascism, communism, and orthodox Marxism.

Throughout his career, he stressed the importance of confronting the Nazi era as uniquely criminal, insisting that postwar-German democracy must recognize and reckon with its guilt.

Friedrich Ernst Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929 in Düsseldorf into a middle-class Protestant family. Like many children of his generation, he joined the Hitler Youth as a boy and was drafted into the German military in 1944. He soon became a strong critic of the Nazi regime.

After the war, he studied philosophy, history, psychology, German literature, and economics in Göttingen, Zurich, and Bonn. As a student at Göttingen University, Habermas criticized Martin Heidegger, the greatest living German philosopher of the time, for a remark Heidegger had made nearly two decades earlier and never retracted concerning “the inner truth and greatness of the Nazi movement.”

“Habermas was a modern day Aristotle or Hegel for whom no precinct of culture or science was alien and a gifted polemicist and partisan in the great German political debates of the postwar and post-reunification era,” said Matthew Specter, an intellectual historian at Santa Clara University, in an email to NPR. “He was a philosopher who taught Europeans how to ‘learn from disaster’ by committing to the practice of reason and a radical liberal whose thought remains a resource for resisting illiberalism, nationalism and authoritarian currents worldwide.”

Habermas’s lectures and books were famously dense. He taught at, among other institutions, the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt am Main, as well as the University of California, Berkeley, and was director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Life-Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg.

His “Theory of Communicative Action” published in 1981 is perhaps his best known work and is considered a foundation of 20th-century critical theory.

“Habermas has been able to go into discussions in political theory and sociology and psychology and legal theory and a dozen different disciplines and become one of the dominant voices in each one,” said former Georgetown University president John DeGioia when introducing the influential thinker before a lecture in 2012.

The philosopher won many awards, such as the prestigious Erasmus Prize in 2013, bestowed by the Dutch Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to individuals or institutions for exceptional contributions to European culture, society, and social science.

As lionized as he was, Habermas’s ideas also came under severe scrutiny. Among other issues, he has been criticized over the years for espousing an idealized theory of communication that ignores power imbalances and practical realities.

Habermas never lost his sense of unbridled hope and insistence on democratic ideals. “Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future,” he wrote in a 2010 article for The New York Times.