Opinion | My Time with Jürgen Habermas, Europe's 'Last Intellectual' - POLITICO

Alexander C. Karp is a co-founder and chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies Inc. He served as a member of the supervisory board of Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company, from April 2018 to early 2020. My first meeting with Jürgen Habermas, who died last week at the age of 96, was inauspicious. It was the summer of 1992, and I had just arrived in Frankfurt am Main after three, somewhat plodding, years in California at law school. The legal profession was experiencing a kind of revival at the time, becoming more accessible to ambitious newcomers like myself. Nearly all of my classmates at Stanford Law School were eager to find jobs at law firms that followed well-established paths. I had different plans. At the age of 24, my firm and un-ironic hope was to become an academic. I wrote a letter to Habermas during my last semester at law school, essentially asking if I could study with him in Frankfurt at Goethe University, where he had become, by nearly every account, the worl

Alexander C. Karp is a co-founder and chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies Inc. He served as a member of the supervisory board of Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company, from April 2018 to early 2020. My first meeting with Jürgen Habermas, who died last week at the age of 96, was inauspicious. It was the summer of 1992, and I had just arrived in Frankfurt am Main after three, somewhat plodding, years in California at law school. The legal profession was experiencing a kind of revival at the time, becoming more accessible to ambitious newcomers like myself. Nearly all of my classm