Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher and sociologist whose thinking profoundly shaped modern Europe, died aged 96.
Habermas was an influential political academic: His 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere argued that democracy requires rational public debate, and he later warned that the EU had a democratic deficit precisely because it lacked a public sphere to hold that debate.
Nonetheless, he argued in favor of deeper integration, writing that a powerful EU was vital to act as a counterweight to US hegemony.
Conscripted into the Hitler Youth as a child, he was horrified by the Nazi regime and later became the “conscience of the nation,” Die Zeit said in an obituary.