About Jürgen Habermas
German philosopher and social theorist (b. 1929), the leading figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School. Habermas's early Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) traces the rise and decline of a bourgeois public sphere in which private citizens debated public matters through reason. His later work on communicative action and discourse ethics defends the possibility of rational consensus and grounds a deliberative theory of democracy that has shaped debates about legitimacy, the media, and the digital public square.
Books by Jürgen Habermas
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
A major European account of public debate, civil society, media, and the conditions of democratic legitimacy.
Read about this book →The Theory of Communicative Action
The major work of the most influential living heir to the Frankfurt School, and an ambitious defense of reason against the pessimism of his predecessors. Where Adorno and Horkheimer saw reason collapse into domination,…
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