ABSTRACT
The body of work produced by Jürgen Habermas represents an astounding accomplishment involving dozens of books and a well-earned profile as a major public intellectual who has contributed to German, European and global scholarship, debates and controversies since the mid-1950s. He is a key figure in ‘critical theory’, is conversant with the western intellectual traditions and has made creative contributions that synthesize Amer ican pragmatism, postWittgenstein analytic philosophy, German Marxism. He also has a continuing interest in the Kantian tradition. He has applied himself to social-political theory, aesthetics, epistemology, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of religion, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric (Bohmann and Rehg, 2014). While I can now see and say this, that wasn’t always the case. I have not intended to read all, or even most of his work, given that his interests and ideas do not always coincide with mine. Like many others, I read his work opportunistically and sometimes accidentally. When I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s Habermas was being translated for an English-speaking readership. At that time I knew of Habermas, but only in the sense that I heard his name mentioned by some of my university teachers and in seminars. At that stage I remember trying to engage with his work, but like many other students I struggled with what was for me at the time an abstract style of writing and thinking. So while Habermas was always ‘on the bookshelf ’, it was a while before the start of a slowly developing relationship. By the time I started my PhD Habermas had published a dozen or more major works. My own research since then has involved considerable work moving along the boundaries between sociology, social theory, criminology, youth studies, policy studies and political studies all informed by an undergraduate education mostly in history and politics. It was only when I became a university academic and an increasingly active researcher in the 1990s and 2000s that I began reading Habermas carefully and thinking about the application of his work to my own. In this chapter I describe how that relationship evolved into a closer, sometimes fraught yet very creative encounter that has shaped my research and thinking.
