ABSTRACT
Some people consider Jürgen Habermas, the leading figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, to be the Kant of the twentieth century. His work is still unfinished, but already he is a classic in the human sciences. A rapid count of the proper name indexes of a selection of philosophical encyclopedias shows that he is the most oft-cited contemporary author. His omnipresence in intellectual debates is the result not only of the consistent quality, density, and rigor of his writing, but also of the encyclopedic breadth of his theory and the exceptional mastery he demonstrates in many different fields of knowledge. Habermas’ thinking is in fact developed and informed through systematic incursions into various disciplines within the human sciences (philosophy, political economy, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics). Usually these incursions involve an extensive, critical, and reconstructive assimilation of the various theories he encounters. Whether it is Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, or Nietzsche, Peirce, Mead, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Austin or Searle, Chomsky, Freud, Piaget or Kohlberg, Marx, Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse or Benjamin, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Parsons, Luhmann or Foucault (to mention just the main influences), Habermas’ analyses, which often become key references in the subject, are always refined and instructive. However, these analyses and his revisions of the classics are not an end in themselves, since from the start his work is informed by a systematic project. As we shall see, his analyses of the classics are only the building blocks of a monumental – not to say monstrously overwhelming – theory of modernity, which engages with both its pathologies and its promises.
