The Philosopher

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.

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