20th century · 1929–2026
Who influenced Jürgen Habermas?
Influences
Reason lives in conversation: communicative action against colonized lifeworlds.
Jürgen Habermas was influenced by Max Weber, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. That is 3 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: photographer: Wolfram Huke at en.wikipedia, http://wolframhuke.de, CC BY-SA 3.0 See the whole map
Who was Jürgen Habermas?
Jürgen Habermas worked in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism and is counted among the Frankfurt School. He taught at Heidelberg and Frankfurt and directed the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) traces the rise and decline of bourgeois public debate, and The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) grounds rationality in communication between people instead of in instrumental reason.
He developed discourse ethics and argued that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project" to be corrected, not dropped. In the Historikerstreit of 1986 he accused conservative historians of relativising the Holocaust; he also argued for closer European integration and, in 2004, debated the public role of religion with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Jürgen Habermas?
3 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Max Horkheimer 1895–1973
- Theodor W. Adorno 1903–1969
The line of teachers behind Jürgen Habermas
The longest documented line of influence ending at Jürgen Habermas runs 27 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- Ludwig Feuerbach
- Karl Marx
- György Lukács
- Theodor W. Adorno
- Jürgen Habermas
Two steps away from Jürgen Habermas
Indirect influences
- Through Theodor W. Adorno: Georg W. F. Hegel, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin
- Through Max Weber: Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx
Contemporaries of Jürgen Habermas
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Jürgen Habermas, with no direct line between them.
- Alasdair MacIntyre 1929–2025
- Bernard Williams 1929–2003
- Jacques Derrida 1930–2004
- Gérard Genette 1930–2018
- Richard Rorty 1931–2007
- Niklas Luhmann 1927–1998
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016
- Michel Foucault 1926–1984
Jürgen Habermas by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 3
- Direct followers
- 0
- Thinkers upstream
- 98
- Thinkers downstream
- 0
- Wikipedia languages
- 86 — #15 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Schools and lineages
- Frankfurt School: György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Jürgen Habermas
Questions about Jürgen Habermas
- Who influenced Jürgen Habermas?
- Max Weber, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
- Who did Jürgen Habermas influence?
- No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on Jürgen Habermas.
- When did Jürgen Habermas live?
- 1929–2026. The map files Jürgen Habermas under the 20th century.
- How rare is the Jürgen Habermas card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Jürgen Habermas in 86 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016