Blackwell Reference Online

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Jürgen Habermas, who retired in 1994 from his post as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt, is the leading representative of the second generation of the neo-Marxist critical theorists often known as the “Frankfurt School” (see Jay, 1973 ; Bottomore, 1984 ; Wiggershaus, 1987 ). Habermas, who studied under Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer after their return to Frankfurt from exile in the USA, differs from them in some crucial ways. Like them, he rejected Marxist philosophies of history, in which an account of the development of capitalism and of the rise of the working class is taken to show that the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism are inevitable, or at least extremely probable. Yet he also felt that Adorno and Horkheimer had painted themselves into a pessimistic corner, from which they could only criticize reality, without offering any alternative. Habermas has argued instead throughout his intellectual career for a return to interdisciplinary critical social science of the kind practiced before the Second World War in Horkheimer's Institute of Social Research. Habermas's mature theory, as he has developed it from the early 1970s, can best be understood as what he would call a “reconstruction” of what is presupposed and implied by human communication, cooperation, and debate. In terms of orthodox academic disciplines, there ... log in or subscribe to read full text