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Jurgen Habermas features as as one of the famous and greatest philosophers in Germany and the rest of the world, who successfully bridged the gap between Anglo-American and continental thoughts. He has openly argued over the works and ideas of thinkers such as Gadamer, Foucault, Putnam, and Rawls, Brandom and Derrida. The name of Jurgen Habermas stands as a part of the "second wave of Critical Theory". Although the various members of the Frankfurt school were not the contemporaries of Jurgen Habermas, he is mentioned as a notable contributor of the school. Thus the Frankfurt School of Thought and Jurgen Habermas are closely associated. The reason for this is his work have carried on with the critique of the former members. Thus his philosophical theories are in the same line as that of the others before him.
Achievements of Jurgen Habermas
The extensive works of Jurgen Habermas are really very vast and they have modified the renowned Marxist theory. "Towards Reconstructing Historical Materialism" is a great work of Jurgen Habermas, where he points out the his main differences with Marx. According to Jurgen Habermas the chief difficulty with modern life is that nobody was really free in modern society. He also stresses that the drawback of Marxism was that it did not talk about the absence of freedom in modern societies. Jurgen Habermas felt that Marx drops the human element in his theory and assesses human evolution only from the point of view of economic advancement. Habermas almost does away totally with the concepts of revolution and class struggle from Marx's theory. In their places he brings in the notion of crisis, which is seen in modern society, where individual needs cannot be met. Jurgen Habermas names the interaction of people to overcome this crisis as "Communicative Action".The remarkable works of Jurgen Habermas deal with an array of subjects such as social-political theory, epistemology, aesthetics, language and philosophy of religion.
