JURGEN HABERMAS: Following His Career

[RonPrice]

In 1962 Jurgen Habermas(b. 1929-), a German man who became one of the most influential sociologists and philosophers in the world during the decades of his middle and late adulthood, accepted the position of extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. That same year, he also published one of his now famous books on the nature of society. He was 33. In 1962 I began my matriculation studies in Ontario and began my travelling-pioneering life for the Canadian Baha’i community. I was 18. I am now 66 and Habermas is 81.

 

I have followed the career and the writing of Habermas since the 1990s when I was a teacher of sociological theory in Western Australia. Like much writing in the field of sociology, the content of this eminent thinker’s work is dense and complex and most students find it a parched and arid wasteland. But some catch an intellectual fire of enthusiasm for Habermas among one or more of the many wide intellectual currents and territories of sociology, as I did back in the 1960s and got a B.A.(sociology) in 1966.-Ron Price with thanks to “Jurgen Habermas,” Wikipedia, 15 August 2010.

 

It’s pretty turgid stuff for the average

person; it dried me out by the end of

my third year of university as many

other aspects of life took me to that

tether’s end like a dry dog-biscuit or

a frozen wasteland just surviving by

the skin of my teeth, little did I know

back then just what my problems were

for it is impossible to see the end in the

beginning: so many things take time as

those wheels of God grind very slowly.

 

But the fires of my enthusiasm for that

new science of groups was rekindled on

my way to Baffinland & then at the other

end of the Earth in Tasmania...they raged

in my mental-set and they’ve been going

out and getting set on fire off-and-on now

for nearly 50 years….You were lucky that

those fires, Jurgen, kept burning, burning!

 

Ron Price 15 August 2010