Jürgen Habermas: A Serious Man

The eminent German thinker Jürgen Habermas died recently at age 96. A liberal secularist and social democrat, he was a towering figure in political philosophy in the post–World War II era, a time during which liberal secularism was dominant in his field.

Born in the waning years of the Weimar Republic, Habermas’s early life was shaped by the rise and fall of Nazism and the subsequent postwar liberal order. Having been a member of the Hitler Youth, he was shaken by revelations at the Nuremberg trials of “collectively realized inhumanity.”