After I had completed my Adorno biography, I told Jürgen Habermas that I intended to continue my activities in the field of biographical research and to make his life and work the next subject of my endeavours, with a view to reconstructing his role as a public intellectual as well as his intellectual path as a philosopher and social theorist. His reaction was altogether restrained. His concise response was that it felt strange to him that someone would want to ‘rummage around’ in his ‘entrails’.

As my research progressed, Ute and Jürgen Habermas became more open towards the project, without ever giving up an appropriate restraint. I would like to thank them especially for retaining this balanced attitude between openness and distance. Without the opportunity of looking at drafts for Habermas’s planned autobiography, of sifting through and making use of the more than 200 files of correspondence at the family home with my assistants, without the private conversations with Ute and Jürgen Habermas and their patience in answering my countless questions, this biography could never have been written.

Of course, the author is responsible in every sense for the content of his book. However, more people were involved in bringing it about than are mentioned on the cover. The authors in this wider sense are in the first place the academic staff of the German Research Foundation’s projects on ‘Jürgen Habermas als Sozialtheoretiker und öffentlicher Intellektueller’ [Jürgen Habermas as social theorist and public intellectual] and on ‘Ideenpolitik in der Öffentlichkeit’ [The politics of ideas in the public sphere]. Christian Ziegler has built up an extensive press archive over the years and has documented and analysed Habermas’s presence in the media. Franziska Charlotte Thiele, occasionally with support from Leiv Erik Voigtländer, carried out discourse analyses of the debates with great methodological skill, and Hartwig Germer concentrated on the investigation of the strategies used by left-liberal and liberal-conservative ideological groups in the battles over the politics of ideas from the late 1960s onwards. I owe all collaborators thanks not only for the time of our joint research but also for their help during the development and completion of the biography. I would also like to thank the German Research Foundation for the financial support, over five years, of the projects mentioned above.

Eva Gilmer’s rigorous editing of the manuscript turned drafts into final versions, and ultimately into this book. The text profited from her feeling for language and her expertise to a degree which went far above and beyond the call of duty for an editor; for this, I would like to thank her. Thanks are also due to Christian Heilbronn for expert work on the print version.

Indispensable sources in writing this book were questions put in writing to individuals who played a role in Habermas’s life, as well as conversations with them, which usually lasted several hours. I would like to mention Karl-Otto Apel, Günter Frankenberg, Ulrich Oevermann, Claus Offe and Spiros Simitis, and I thank all of them for their time and their recollections.

I am also indebted to all those individuals who provided me with important information, and various pieces of advice, during my work on this biography. Here I would like to mention Susanne Berghahn, Matthias Bormuth, Hauke Brunkhorst, Luca Corchia, Josef Dörr, Friedrich Wilhelm Fernau, René Görtzen, Adalbert Hepp, Friedhelm Herborth, Axel Honneth, Mathias Jehn, Thomas Jung, Oliver Kleppel, Ahlrich Meyer, William Outhwaite, Gerhard Pomykaj, Günter Rohrbach, Wolfgang Schopf, Bernd Stiegler, Albrecht Wellmer, Jürgen Woelke, Richard Wolin, Roman Yos, Raimar Zons and Dorothee Zucca. Finally, to those friends and partners in conversation who are not mentioned here by name, but who so reliably lent sympathetic ears to my ideas and questions, I offer my heartfelt thanks.

© juergen-bauer.com, Jürgen Bauer, Leidersbach: no. 31

Bpk-images/Foto Abisag Tüllmann, Berlin: nos. 17 and 25

Uwe Dettmar, Frankfurt am Main: nos. 32 and 33

© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, archive, Frankfurt am Main: no. 9

Private archive of Friedrich Wilhelm Fernau, Neuss: no. 3

Heimatbildarchiv des Oberbergischen Kreises, Nr. 5612: no. 7

Architekturbüro Hilmer & Sattler und Albrecht, Munich: no. 20

Barbara Klemm, Frankfurt am Main: no. 34

Ev Kriegel, Wiesbaden: p. 1

Cássio Loredano: Rio de Janeiro: p. 428

Franziska Messner-Rast, St Gallen, Switzerland: no. 27

Konrad R. Müller/Agentur Focus, Hamburg: no. 1

Rolf Oeser, Bad Vilbel: no. 30

Picture alliance/dpa: no. 29

Städtisches Gymnasium Moltkestraße Gummersbach: no. 5

Universitätsarchiv, Frankfurt am Main: no. 13

© Joachim Unseld, Frankfurt am Main, Nr. 242/29: no. 24

All other illustrations are from Jürgen Habermas’s private archive or the archive of the Suhrkamp publishing house.

It is true that I do not share the fundamental assumptions of ‘Critical Theory’ in the form in which they took shape at the beginning of the 1940s.¹

Ironic birthday greetings from a cartoonist. Strictly speaking, Habermas does not belong in this well-known group portrait by the draughtsman, poet and jazz musician Volker Kriegel, who came into contact with the individuals it depicts during his time as a student in 1960s Frankfurt. What stands out when one looks at the image is the oversized figure of Max Horkheimer, a patriarchal figure towering over three important personalities, who are shrunk to dwarf-like size ‘under him’: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. The message of the portrait – that this is the quadriga of Critical Theory – can only be taken ironically. It is true that Max Horkheimer, the spiritus rector of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and someone who, according to Adorno, had a ‘flair for power relations’,² wrote academic history during his lifetime. It was he who coined the term ‘Critical Theory’. But he was anything but a selfless mentor to these three wholly different spirits, who were united under one roof in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research but were certainly not always in agreement with one another. These three did not form a tight-knit, like-minded community and certainly not one that flocked around a charismatic ‘leader’, as for instance the circle around the poet Stefan George or the Paris existentialists around Jean-Paul Sartre. Rather, they were autonomous and independent representatives of different manners and styles of thinking. Nevertheless, there was one common denominator, albeit a small one, and that was an attitude which aimed at an enlightening critique of what they saw as social malformations.

It would certainly be an exaggeration simply to call Habermas – who was, not only in this caricature but also in reality, much taller than Marcuse or Adorno – the renegade within this group of four philosophers. And yet he was the Other among his peers. Habermas is about thirty years younger than Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno, each of whom, in their own way, was an intellectual role model for him. He therefore belongs to a different generation. As opposed to the three older philosophers, he came not from a Jewish family but from a Protestant environment. Habermas, whose childhood and early youth fell in the time of National Socialism, was spared the experience of racism and political persecution, as well as the fate of exile. Further, it is another significant difference between the Jewish left-wing intellectuals and Habermas that the latter – despite his speech impediment, resulting from a cleft palate – never saw himself as an outsider. Instead, it was largely his experience in the years immediately following the Second World War that gave rise to his development as a homo politicus. The way the political establishment of the young Federal Republic dealt with the legacy of the criminal Nazi regime and the shortcomings that became apparent regarding the creation of democratic forms of life in Germany were both crucial to Habermas’s political development. But, despite all the critical distance that he maintained towards the political situation around him – and still maintains today – he always saw himself as an active participant in the social and political process. Thus, in his case, there can be no talk of that fundamental feeling of displacement and marginalization, that peculiar feeling of not belonging, which accompanied Adorno or Marcuse all their lives. In conversation, Habermas said that, all in all, his life took an unspectacular course.³ And, indeed, his biography does not contain any deep fissures or discontinuities; it is above all a story of academic success, on the one hand, and of energetic interventions into political affairs on the other.

While Adorno and Marcuse were occasionally in competition for the approval of Horkheimer (who skilfully exploited this situation to his strategic advantage), Habermas, as a temporary collaborator of the restored Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, immediately earned the explicit disapproval of its director. Horkheimer was irritated by the political commitments of the new assistant and by his theoretical project, which aimed at an adaptation of Marxism as a philosophy of history for practical purposes. In the climate of restoration of post-war Germany, Horkheimer pursued a policy of pointed inconspicuousness, at least towards the outside world. This attitude was not shared by the majority of the institute’s members and was difficult to reconcile with the non-conformism and the kind of progressive, Marxist social criticism that characterized the institute before its forced exile from Nazi Germany.

However, Habermas never saw the ‘Frankfurt School’ – as it became known to the world from the 1960s onwards – as a sharply defined programme. And this was possibly the most important reason why he was the Other among his peers at the time. ‘For me’, he admitted in an interview, ‘there was no critical theory, no consistent doctrine.’⁴ As points of orientation, he could take only those few scattered books and articles that were published up to the end of the 1960s. The institute’s groundbreaking studies, its members from the Weimar years and from the time in American exile, ‘these did not exist. Horkheimer had a great fear that we would get to the crate’ in which the collected volumes of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung [Journal for Social Research] from the years 1932 to 1941 were stored away⁵ – the journal that was programmatic for the original conception of Critical Theory. However, Habermas was not going to be deterred by this; for whoever wanted to do so could get hold of the legendary journal, ‘this sunken continent’ of the revolutionary legacy,⁶ at the neighbouring Institut für Politische Wissenschaft [Institute for Political Science], where Carlo Schmid held a chair. Schmid’s assistant, Wilhelm Hennis, had acquired the volumes from an antiquarian bookshop in Paris and made them part of the institute’s library. Habermas’s reading, in his own words, ‘sharpen[ed] [his] sense of the precarious connection between democracy, state and the economy’.⁷ However, in the early 1970s, partly under the influence of Anglo-American linguistic theory, Habermas began to develop his own paradigm of communicative reason and actions oriented towards reaching understanding; he thus departed from the course pursued by the representatives of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. From then on, his philosophy concentrated on ‘clarifying the conditions under which moral as well as ethical questions can be answered in a rational fashion by those concerned.’⁸

Deviation and attribution. When Volker Kriegel’s cartoon first appeared, Habermas was in his forties. He had already become aware of the deficiencies of classical Critical Theory at that point and had worked on the foundations of his own philosophical programme. The received wisdom that there is a strict continuity from the first through to the third generation of the Frankfurt School is therefore, upon closer inspection, incorrect. The trivial reason why Habermas is nevertheless perceived as one of the school’s representatives is simply that, by the end of the 1960s, he had already taught for several terms at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt as an ordinary professor^* of philosophy and sociology. And it must be seen as an irony of history that this was actually Max Horkheimer’s old chair and that Habermas, of all people, had succeeded him. Habermas described his feeling about being identified with a theoretical school, in an interview with Wolfram Schütte and Thomas Assheuer in June 1993, as follows:

[T]he labels attached to theories tend to say more about the history of misunderstandings than about the theories themselves. This also holds true for buzzwords such as ‘discourse’ or ‘domination-free communication’. If you wish to concentrate, in the form of slogans, [on] conclusions drawn from a theory, you at least have to relate them to the problems from which the theory starts out. I started from the black-on-black of the older Critical Theory, which had worked through experiences of fascism and Stalinism. Although our situation after 1945 was different, it was this disillusioned outlook in the driving forces of a self-destructive social dynamics that first led me to seek the sources of an individual’s solidarity with others, which have not yet totally evaporated.⁹

Instead of living off the legacy of Critical Theory, Jürgen Habermas carried out its transformation in terms of a communicative turn in social theory. Its point of departure is the rational potential in linguistic practice and its goal is the idea of a sound intersubjectivity as a ‘glimmer of symmetrical relations marked by free, reciprocal recognition. … Connected with this’, Habermas says, ‘is the modern meaning of humanism, long expressed in the idea of a self-conscious life, of authentic self-realization, and of autonomy – a humanism that is not bent on self-assertion.’¹⁰ While the still critical aspect of his social theory manifests itself in a moral point of view,^† in holding on to the ‘negative idea of abolishing discrimination and harm’,¹¹ his postmetaphysical framework of thought keeps its distance from a philosophy of history which assumes the idea of an absolute negativity ruling over all of existence.

The intransigence Habermas displays in his public political interventions is a crucial reason why he is still counted as a member of the circle around Horkheimer and Adorno. It is these interventions that earned him the title of being a contrarian. He is connected with the radically critical thought that we identify with the Frankfurt School’s readings of Hegel, Marx and Freud because he was present as someone raising crucial issues and as one of the dominant interpreters of transitional moments in the decades that witnessed the cultural and political liberalization of Germany. This role as a politically active public intellectual – as an active citizen of a democratically constituted polity who, as he once expressed it, rises to speak without having a political mandate – made him the main representative of the second generation of Critical Theory. Habermas, incidentally, would wish to see this activity as strictly separate from the function he performs as a scholar in teaching and research. ‘What annoys me terribly’, he once remarked disapprovingly, ‘what gets to me, is the aggressiveness of people who do not see the role-differentiation in me.’¹² True to his word, Habermas has not only reasoned in theoretical terms about the ‘peculiar non-coercive force of the better argument’ but has personally made abundant public use of such reason.

The moment of catastrophe is also the moment of emancipation.¹