The Philosopher

Jürgen Habermas is the voice of a generation. One of the world’s most influential philosophers and Germany’s greatest living intellectual, Habermas has shaped debates, both academic and public, for more than half a century. For as long as 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 his question, Felsch plunged anew into Habermas’ 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 great 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. An Afternoon in Starnberg
In the Upside-down World
Perpetrators and Victims
Farewell to Profundity
The Consciousness of the Present
The Centre Does Not Hold
Running the Gauntlet in Frankfurt
Rocket Science for a Better Society
What We Must Presuppose
The Stigma of the Spoken
Uncanny Germany
Theory of the Loss of Meaning
Was That Really Necessary?
Taxonomy of the Counter-Enlightenment
Distance and Thymos
J’accuse
Back from the Future
History and Memory
Stirrings of Postnational Feeling
The Primacy of Global Domestic Politics
On War
The Philosopher of the Universal Provinces


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