Habermas among top 100 "Global Thinkers"

Jürgen Habermas is listed by the Foreign Policy magazine amongst the Top 100 "Global Thinkers" 2012:

"Among a generation of gloomy 20th-century European philosophers who sought to tear down reason and justice as instruments of oppression, Jürgen Habermas long remained an intemperate optimist. He found his inspiration in the coffeehouses and cafes of an earlier era in European history and, in 1981, coined his most famous concept: communicative rationality, the idea that the very process of talking and arguing produces agreement.

But the current crisis in Europe has beaten the optimism out of Habermas. He has described European politicians' halting response to the mess as a creeping coup d'état that has put power in the hands of faceless bureaucrats in Brussels. And as the eurozone economy imploded, the nationalism that the European Union was supposed to suppress came roaring back, with parties across the continent dabbling in a potent brew of racism and Islamophobia that has turned right-wing extremism into a political growth industry. For the first time in the EU's history, the 83-year-old Habermas told Der Spiegel, "we are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn't think this was possible."

So what is this Europe whose decline Habermas so laments -- and how will it be saved? In his new book, The Crisis of the European Union, Habermas lays out a case for a more cosmopolitan Europe that more fully transcends its national borders, where political power vested in an EU government elected by the people of Europe would foster the kind of cross-border solidarity that the crisis has so clearly exposed as lacking. It is a bold vision of a pan-European democracy that would effectively end state sovereignty and foster a unity that no market force could undermine. In a year of stifling incrementalism, Habermas's ambitious vision is like a breath of fresh air."

See the full list here. 

The list also includes Michael Sandel and Martha Nussbaum.