Jurgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929) is a German philosopher, political scientist, and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory, best known for his concept of the "public sphere." His numerous and complex writings span many aspects of social theory, and constitute his effort to advance the Enlightenment project to develop human society based on our rational faculty, and thus free people from irrational superstition and intolerance. He has warned that society faces a crisis, as our "life-world," in which our shared values and practices are developed and constantly reaffirmed through communicative action, has increasingly been dominated by administrative and economic systems that preclude the chance for such communication. Nevertheless, Habermas has remained optimistic that the "public sphere" can be redeveloped, and human society can advance to a better state, founded on common understanding, caring for the needs of all its members. Jurgen Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1929. His father, a director at the local seminary, was involved in the Nazi regime, and encouraged his son to join the Hitler Youth. Habermas was sent to the western front in the last months of WWII, when he was only 15 years old. After the Nuremberg trials, where the secrets of the concentration camps were revealed, Habermas came to realize the true nature of Nazi regime, something he had been fighting for. He was also horrified at how easily former Nazis, who had perpetrated such atrocities, were able to resume life in Germany society, acting as if nothing had happened. This experience changed his life, and is reflected in his philosophical works on political systems. After the war, in 1946, Habermas enrolled in the University of Bonn. There, he came under influence of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Hegel, and Georg Lukacs.

 He received his Ph.D. in 1954. Habermas burst onto the German intellectual scene soon after, with an influential critique of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Habermas had studied philosophy and sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main since 1956, under critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. However, because of a rift over his dissertation between the two—Horkheimer believed that Habermas was too radical and had made unacceptable demands for revision—as well as his own belief that the Frankfurt School had become paralyzed with political skepticism and disdain for modern culture, he took his Habilitation in political science at the University of Marburg under Wolfgang Abendroth, one of the new Marxist professors in Germany. In 1961, Habermas became a privatdozent in Marburg, and in an unusual move for the German academic scene at that time, he was called to an "extraordinary professorship" of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg (at the instigation of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith) in 1962. In 1964, strongly supported by Adorno, Habermas returned to Frankfurt to take over Horkheimer's chair in philosophy and sociology. Habermas was one of the second generation of philosophers and social theorists in the Frankfurt School whose members included Horkheimer, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno, members of the first generation of theorists, expressed their distrust of rationality and argued that rationality inherently had moments of cruelty and violence. Citing Greek mythology, specifically the Odyssey, they argued that the story illustrates the tragic outcome of reason. The myth describes Odysseus’s journey from Troy (barbarous land) to Greece (land of reason), and upon arrival to the land of reason, Odysseus carries out a massive slaughter. Thus as exemplified in the myth, violence was an inherent part of rationality. The Holocoust and Stalin’s mass murders are examples in modern society of the massive destructive power of reason and the quest for rationality. However, against Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic distrust, disappointment, and criticism of rationality, Habermas attempted to re-construct rationality on grounds different from his predecessors. Jurgen Habermas considers his own major achievement to be the development of the concept and theory of "communicative reason" or "communicative rationality," which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of either the objective world or the knowing subject. This social theory advances the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive Universalist moral framework. This framework rests on the argument called universal pragmatics—that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for "purpose" or "goal")—the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding.