Jürgen Habermas

Abstract

The most important intellectual source of Habermas’ thinking is the broad, flexible and interdisciplinary Marxist tradition which inspired what came to be called the ‘Frankfurt School’ of Critical Theory, based in the early 1930s and again from 1950 in the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. As Habermas showed in detail in his Theory of Communicative Action, this tradition draws on both Marx and Max Weber, on another non-Marxist, Weber’s contemporary Georg Simmel, and on the father of ‘western Marxism’, Georg Lukács. In an autobiographical interview, Habermas recalls reading Lukács for the first time with great excitement, but with a sense that his work was no longer directly relevant to post-war societies such as West Germany. His thinking remained shaped, however, by a western Marxist agenda emphasizing the interplay between capitalist exploitation and bureaucratic state rule, and their implications for individual identity and collective political autonomy. More concretely, as a member of what has been called the ‘Hitler Youth generation’, drawn as a child into complicity with the most appalling regime of modern times, he was horrified both by the crimes of the Third Reich and by the unwillingness of his compatriots to face up to their responsibility for what had happened.