The Philosopher: Habermas and Us

Jürgen Habermas is the voice of a generation. One of the world’s most influential philosophers and Germany’s greatest living intellectual, he has shaped debates, both academic and public, for more than half a century. For as long as the cultural historian Philipp Felsch can remember, Habermas has been around: as an admonishing voice of reason, as the moral conscience of post-Holocaust German society, as the son of his grandparents’ neighbours in Gummersbach. Is the philosopher’s intellectual supremacy coming to an end today, or are his ideas gaining new relevance in the crisis times in which we now find ourselves?

To answer this question, Felsch plunged anew into Habermas’s voluminous work and travelled to his home to talk with him over tea and cake about the concerns that have motivated him, the people who have influenced him and the controversies in which he has been involved. Can the ideas that the philosopher has championed throughout his career - universalism, reason, dialogue - be of any help to us now as we face the major challenges of the twenty-first century?

This compelling account of a strikingly original thinker is also a portrait of an epoch that bears his imprint and a glimpse of a future we could embrace.

Philipp Felsch is Professor of Cultural History at Humboldt University, Berlin.