ABSTRACT
Jürgen Habermas was born near Düsseldorf in Germany in 1929. He was educated at the Universities of Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn before becoming a research assistant to Theodor Adorno at the University of Frankfurt in 1959 (Edgar, 2006; Outhwaite, 2009). He subsequently held a number of academic positions at a variety of German and American universities before returning to the University of Frankfurt as Professor Emeritus in Philosophy (Edgar, 2006). He is perhaps best known for his work addressing political emancipation. Here, he critiqued the misuse of positivist models in the social sciences and, perhaps more importantly, social policy (Edgar, 2006). This work is best illustrated in his The theory of communicative action: Reason and the rationalisation of society (1984), The theory of communicative action: Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason (1987) and Moral consciousness and communicative action (1990).
