Jürgen Habermas - Thinker Who Shaped Germany

On the death of the philosopher who served as director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World from 1971 to 1981

On March 14, 2026, Jürgen Habermas passed away in Starnberg at the age of 96. With his death, we have lost a thinker who helped shape the intellectual and political culture of the Federal Republic over seven decades - and who remained steadfastly committed to his foundational questions until the very end.

An obituary by Jürgen Renn

Habermas belonged to the generation that had consciously lived through National Socialism and then experienced the stifling climate of postwar restoration - the deliberate silence over past crimes, the persistence of authoritarian attitudes. When, in 1953, as a young doctoral student, he publicly protested in the Frankfurter Allgemeine against the republication of Heidegger's Nazi-era lectures, it marked the beginning of a stance he would maintain throughout his life: that science and philosophy cannot be permitted to evade their own history or their social responsibility.

It was from this same impulse that the Max Planck Society established its social-science institutes in the 1960s. Both the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg sought to transform traumatic experiences into forward-looking, critical inquiry.

In his Habilitation thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1961), Habermas examined how a democratic public sphere emerges, how it is eroded by commercialization and power interests - and under what conditions it can be renewed. It is a diagnosis that takes on striking relevance in the age of algorithmic filter bubbles and targeted disinformation. His magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), elevated these ideas into a comprehensive social theory: true reason, he argued, is not actualized in the isolated subject, but solely through the uncoerced pursuit of mutual understanding among individuals.

This conviction was more than theory; it was a fundamental stance. Habermas did not merely observe the debates of his time from the sidelines; he intervened decisively in them - in the "Historians' Dispute," the debate over nuclear rearmament, the project of European integration, the financial crisis, and the rise of authoritarian movements. In recognition of this lifelong public commitment, he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2001 - an honour that acknowledged not only his scholarship, but the inseparable bond between his work and the public conduct that defined his life. As recently as last year, he objected to the proposal of naming an AI system for conflict resolution after him, asserting that human understanding cannot be delegated to a machine. It was one of his final public statements - and a telling one.

A decade in Starnberg

In 1971, the Max Planck Society appointed Jürgen Habermas as a Scientific Member and Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg - an appointment met with significant opposition owing to his political stance. It was, however, a logical step: the Institute, conceived by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1967, addressed the very questions that preoccupied Habermas, and did so with an interdisciplinary scope unprecedented within the Max Planck Society. Weizsäcker oversaw research on war prevention and strategy, quantum theory foundations, and the history of science; Habermas led a second area on crisis potentials in late-capitalist societies, state crisis management, and the ontogenesis of moral consciousness. It was not a purely social-science institute - it was an ambitious attempt to bring together the natural sciences, philosophy, and social theory under the guiding principle that science should make the consequences of its own actions a subject of research. As one colleague recalled: "We wanted to solve the world's biggest problems with a radically new kind of science." The research from those years fed directly into The Theory of Communicative Action, which Habermas published in 1981 - his final year as director.

From the outset, the Institute was controversial, both within the Max Planck Society and in the public sphere, operating under sustained political pressure. Equally remarkable was its effort to organise its own working practices democratically - freedoms that Weizsäcker, in particular, extended generously, turning the Institute into a laboratory not only of thought, but of scholarly practice itself. Plans for an honorary professorship that would have tied Habermas to Munich University fell through. Following Weizsäcker's retirement, the Institute reached an institutional impasse: all attempts to establish a viable foundation through new appointments faltered. In April 1981, Habermas resigned; in May, the Senate voted to close the Institute.

The Starnberg legacy

Starnberg marked the end of a utopian chapter in the Max Planck Society: the bold experiment to unite basic research and social transformation within a single institution, including its own internal practices. What followed was pragmatic reorientation. From the remnants of the social‑science institute that briefly outlived Habermas's resignation, the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research emerged in Munich under Franz Weinert; from 1983, Habermas served there as an External Scientific Member. In 1985, the Society founded the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne - empirically oriented and analytically detached from politics, a deliberate departure from the Starnberg model. Beyond this, Habermas served on the advisory board of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the other major Max Planck foundation born of that same impulse to link science with social responsibility.

The question Starnberg posed was never settled by its closure: how a scientific organisation devoted to the advancement of knowledge can at the same time engage in critical reflection on the social consequences of that progress - not as a perfunctory exercise, nor delegated to ethics committees, but as an integral part of research itself. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker spoke of 'securing a space of freedom amidst a technocratically administered world.'

He did not mean the freedom to conduct research undisturbed, but the freedom to interrogate one's own practice - the questions one asks, the institutions in which one works, the society one serves, and the consequences for which one is responsible. Habermas understood this freedom as an exacting demand one must be willing to accept. It remains a challenge for the Max Planck Society - and for any scientific organization that takes its social responsibility seriously

The Max Planck Society honours the memory of Jürgen Habermas with deep gratitude - for a decade in Starnberg that ranks among the boldest chapters in its history, and for a body of work whose influence endures far beyond that era.