Jürgen Habermas

This book is an extraordinary accomplishment, bringing together nearly seven decades of Habermas’s journalistic writings with his theoretical work to cast new light on both. Drawing on Habermas’s newly collected archives, Verovšek illuminates Habermas’s unique understanding of the public intellectual as a democratic citizen who is at once an irritant to public discourse and a synthesizer of inchoate cultural and social trends. – Seyla Benhabib, professor emerita, Yale University, and senior research scholar, Columbia Law SchoolVerovšek’s study of Habermas brings together philosophically rich and compelling theoretical analysis with engrossing biographical and historical details, touching on some of the most important political and social events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Within the intense and sustained scrutiny of Habermas’s work, Verovšek offers an entirely new and original perspective. – Simone Chambers, University of California, IrvineJürgen Habermas stands as the last and greatest public intellectual of our time. In this extraordinarily thoughtful book, Peter Verovšek guides us through Habermas’s career in the public sphere to show why the very ideal of the public intellectual now seems threatened with extinction. For all those who care about the future of reasonable discussion in our now-embattled democracies, this is an instructive—indeed, crucial—study. – Peter E. Gordon, Harvard UniversityIn meticulously reconstructing the intellectual biography of Jürgen Habermas, Peter J. Verovšek offers both a study on how to mediate between theory and practice in the spirit of critical theory and a reflection on the place of the philosopher in modern democratic life. This book sheds a unique light on a pivotal figure of our time, who may have been in retrospect the last classical public intellectual. – Axel Honneth, Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University

Peter J. Verovšek is senior assistant professor in history and theory of European integration at the University of Groningen. He is the author of Memory and the Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War (2020).