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Habermas attended high school in Gummersbach. From 1949 to 1954 he studied psychology, philosophy, economics and German literature in Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn. He received his doctorate at the University of Bonn with a doctorate on the topic "The Absolute in History. An investigation into Schelling's world age philosophy". phil. In 1955, Habermas married Ute Wesselhoeft, with whom he became the father of three children, Tilmann, Rebekka and Judith. From 1954 to 1956, Habermas worked as a professional journalist. Following this, a call from Theodor W. Adorno took him to work at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt/M. During this activity he also became acquainted with empirical social research, which led him to critical social theory.
In 1961, Habermas completed his habilitation on the "Structural Change of the Public. Investigations into a Category of Civil Society". In the following decades, the font developed into a groundbreaking standard work. In the same year he became associate professor of philosophy in Heidelberg. He was co-author of a paper by the Frankfurt Social Research Institute on the political consciousness of students in West Germany. Habermas contributed the foreword to the text "Student and Politics". In it he expressed for the first time his view of the nature of the democratic constitutional state, for which he postulated the formation of will without coercion. From 1964 to 1971, Habermas held a professorship for philosophy and sociology at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt/M. inside. He became the most popular representative of critical theory, which developed from the Frankfurt School.
During the student movement of the late 1960s, Habermas allowed himself to be captured by the moderate left, but he rejected the radicalism of the other student groups. The work "Knowledge and Interest," published in 1968, made him internationally known. From 1971 to 1983, Habermas was director of the Starnberg Max Planck Institute. There he dedicated himself to researching living conditions in the scientific and technical world. His writings "Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism" and "Reconstruction of Bourgeois Materialism" were published in 1973 and 1976 respectively. Habermas's awards already included the Hegel Prize of the City of Stuttgart (1976) and the Sigmund Freud Prize in Darmstadt (1976), the Adorno Prize (1980), the honorary doctorate from the New School for Social Research in New York (1981), the sibling Scholl Prize (1985), the Wilhelm Leuschner Medal (1985), the Sonnig Prize (1987) , the Heidelberg Karl Jaspers Prize (1995) and the Theodor Heuss Prize (1999).
The philosopher was also awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Jerusalem, Buenos Aires and Hamburg (1989), the Universities of Utrecht and Northwestern University Evanston (1991), the University of Athens (1993) and the University of Tel Aviv (1999). Habermas' main work "Theory of Communicative Action" was published in 1981. Eleven years later, his second central work entitled "Facticity and Validity" was published. In it, philosophical analyzes are combined with the demands of modern social sciences. In 1983 he was accepted into the "German Academy for Language and Poetry" in Darmstadt. In 1983, Habermas returned to Frankfurt University to teach as a professor of philosophy until 1994, concentrating on the area of social and historical philosophy. During this time he played a key role in the debates about the positivism dispute, postmodernism and authoritarianism as well as civil disobedience and systems theory.
The philosopher criticized the historian Ernst Nolte in the mid-1980s in the so-called "historians' dispute". Habermas sharply attacked Nolte's relativization of the monstrous genocide of the Jews in the Third Reich. Habermas' work "Facticity and Validity", published in 1992, is about the theory of the rule of law. In 1995 the work entitled "The Normality of a Berlin Republic" was published. His other works include the study "The Inclusion of Others" (1996), the essay "From Sensual Impression to Symbolic Expression" (1996) and the essay collection "Truth and Justification" (1999). Habermas was honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2001. In autumn 2004 he received the Kyoto Prize for Art and Philosophy in Japan. In the same year the title "The Divided West. Small Political Writings X" was published.
On September 15, 2007, he opened a three-day congress in Rome entitled "Religion and Politics in Post-Secular Society." In 2013 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and the Kassel Citizens' Prize "The Glass of Reason". In 2015 he received the Kluge Prize and 2018 the Great German-French Media Prize.
