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Jürgen Habermas, who receives the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin next week, is Germany’s foremost philosopher and critical theorist. His lifelong work on language, communicative reason and discourse in the public sphere, along with their central importance for democracy, makes him one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Aged 80, he continues to publish prolifically. Recent work deals with religion and pluralism in modern life, contrasting knowledge and methods in the natural and social sciences, the ethics of media communication and how international law can legitimate a “global domestic politics”.
He supports deeper European integration so that democracy is developed regionally beyond – but in harness with – legitimate nation-states. This approach could be a model for a transformed cosmopolitan world order through the United Nations. A social democrat, he is a sharp critic of technocratic regulation and neo-liberal ways of governing. But since the end of the Cold War he says it has “become impossible to break out of the universe of capitalism, which must be civilised and tamed from within”.
