Jürgen Habermas

Habermas grew up in postwar Germany and asked the question that haunted his generation: how did a civilization of high culture and systematic philosophy produce Auschwitz? His answer drew on the Frankfurt School and on the philosophy of language. What had gone wrong was the reduction of reason to its instrumental form — the optimization of means toward given ends. What was needed was communicative rationality: the kind of reason exercised in genuine dialogue, where the only force is the force of the better argument. His Theory of Communicative Action built this into a philosophy of society. His later work on democracy argued that legitimate political authority requires a public sphere in which citizens reason together without coercion. He is one of the last survivors of the generation that rebuilt European thought after the catastrophe. He has not stopped arguing.