Last fall, I received an offer I found to be irresistible. Polity Books was preparing two new volumes on Jürgen Habermas, I was told, both of which featured his collaboration, and would I like to interview him for this magazine? I certainly would. Habermas has long been a sort of lodestar in my political thinking and philosophical learning. Simultaneously a socialist, a democrat, an internationalist, and above all a humanitarian, Habermas was described to me by his fellow philosopher Steven Lukes as the “Enlightenment philosophe for our time. He envisaged the public sphere as enabling people to reason together despite their disagreements and imagined better arguments prevailing in politics. He saw all that made these ideals look impossible but strove to render them at least conceivable. As their prospects become ever dimmer, his profound defense of them is his precious legacy.”
I read his books (though not, I admit, all 40 of them). I worked on my questions. I sent them off and planned follow-ups. (You can read those questions here.) After not hearing anything back for a while, I inquired about what was up. I was told on March 11 that he had decided he did not feel up to doing any more interviews. And then, three days later, the news came: Habermas was dead at 96; and with him, I fear, a whole optimistic way of looking at history, the world, and the potential of humans to create genuinely democratic societies.
Habermas’s seven decades of thinking, writing, and, above all, debating have so far inspired 14,000 books and articles, with many more no doubt on the way. In his tenth decade, he somehow managed to publish a 1,700-page, two-volume work (three, in English) that he called Also a History of Philosophy.
Born in 1929 in Dusseldorf, Habermas established his pedigree early when, in 1956, he became Theodor W. Adorno’s research assistant at the University of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, the home of what we know as “the Frankfurt School” and the generally agreed-upon birthplace of critical theory. He lasted there only three years because of the conflict between engagement with Germany’s antinuclear movement and the increasingly conservative views of the institute’s head, Max Horkheimer. He left for the University of Marburg, where his second dissertation became the landmark work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. He would return to Frankfurt in 1964 to take over Horkheimer’s chair in philosophy and sociology, the two having reconciled.
The work, unlike much of what came out of Frankfurt, was an embrace of the Enlightenment in the tradition of Kantian ethical reasoning, in which Kant’s famous “categorical imperative” is replaced by a commitment to “discourse ethics” in the service of mutual understanding and, beneath these ideas, a belief in the possibility of a genuinely democratic socialism. While not at all doctrinaire, Habermas nevertheless credited Marxism with giving him both the impetus and the analytical means to investigate the development of the relationship between democracy and capitalism.
Habermas located potential examples of democratic consensus building in eighteenth-century Europe, and especially in Britain—where the licensing of publications, the most effective form of censorship, had been allowed to lapse in 1662—by virtue of the debates taking place in the new free outlets of what we now call the media, augmented by arguments in coffeehouses and even Masonic lodges. This was the origin of the idea of the “public sphere”: a notion that remains crucial to our understanding of the mechanics of meaningful democracy today.
When, decades ago, I was writing a book on the role of democracy in foreign policy, I was thrilled to be invited to a conference where Habermas would be speaking. I was particularly interested in his views on what he understood to be the foundational requirements for a successful public sphere. In those days, for instance, the closest analogue I could imagine in the United States was the then-welcoming spaces inside Barnes & Noble and Starbucks, where you could then sit all day with friends and colleagues and argue about the state of the world. Then again, they were owned and run by typically rapacious capitalists (remember the movie You’ve Got Mail, where Tom Hanks’s mega-bookstore was crushing Meg Ryan’s neighborhood gem?), which were devastating to the smaller, people-focused bookstores and coffeehouses that had previously been understood to provide such spaces. What did Habermas think?
To be honest, I forget exactly. (We were at the bar for quite a while.) But he did, in my view at the time, put far greater emphasis on the role of nongovernmental organizations and other organs of civil society than I thought they could shoulder. Critics of his original argument found much the same in his history, which struck many as aspirational in places rather than strictly accurate.
Habermas’s second great work, at least judged by the number of critiques and graduate-school syllabi it inspired, was 1981’s Theory of Communicative Action, in which he once again sought to find the appropriate conditions for a truly democratic public sphere. He did so through the notion of what became known as “deliberative democracy,” which he posited as an alternative to representative democracy, whose “lifeworld” he believed to have been corrupted by systems of colonization and domination led by a “steering media” underwritten by powerful, and politically minded, corporations. Habermas nevertheless imagined an “ideal speech situation,” in which ideas could be subject to an “acid bath of relentless public discourse” and therefore would allow citizens to “exercise collective influence over their social destiny.” In this manner, he deemed “rational communication as a chance to redeem democratic society.”
Despite his pessimism about the possibility of his democratic hopes ever coming into being, Habermas took extremely seriously the role he had been granted as Germany’s most influential public intellectual. The United States has never seen a philosopher whose views were taken as seriously as Habermas’s were in the Federal Republic (that is, West Germany, in the Cold War days); and its successor, unified Germany, likely never had granted any philosopher the influence and respect Habermas enjoyed in the democratic Germany.
Born in Dusseldorf in 1929, Habermas began life as both the son of a Nazi and a member of the Hitler Youth and served in the medical corps but managed to miss being drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1944 as the Allies marched across Germany and eventually ended the war. His first entry into the German public discourse came in 1953, when he published a critical review of republished lectures by Martin Heidegger, in which Heidegger spoke of the “inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist movement. Among the most important causes Habermas embraced was the battle he waged to insist Nazism had not been a “foreign body” in the fabric of “an essentially healthy culture,” as a number of conservative German historians sought to argue in the 1980s, but that it instead was able to draw on “the darkest legacy of that culture” and remained present in German culture long after Hitler’s followers had passed away. In doing so, Habermas succeeded in blunting the historians’ bid to normalize the German past by treating Nazism as a particular, and aberrant, historical moment, occasioned by the rise of Bolshevism and the humiliation of Versailles.
In addition to the soft-on-Nazism brigade, Habermas at various times found himself in public scrapes with Michel Foucault, whose arguments about the “genealogy of power” Habermas found overly pessimistic in his explicit rejection of Kant and the Enlightenment. Habermas felt similarly about the Frankfurt School’s focus on the power of “false consciousness.” In critiquing the views of Jacques Derrida, he found himself musing on the phenomenon of “French irrationalism.” Habermas trumpeted the value of Enlightenment reasoning and found himself furious at what he called the “performative contradiction” of the French post-structuralists, Foucault and Derrida foremost among them, in rejecting this fundamental building block of deliberative democracy on the basis of merely clever, largely literary arguments.
On the other end of the spectrum, he also disagreed with John Rawls’s emphasis on the ability of individuals to constitute the necessary foundations of a democratic polity as mere atomized individuals, though he mostly continued to keep, or reestablish, warm relations with those thinkers with whom he publicly disagreed. Habermas and Derrida came together in 2005 to embrace a European alternative to the “hegemonic unilateralism” of the United States. And asked by a then-young Cass Sunstein who he thought was the “greatest thinker about democracy,” Rawls replied, “Habermas.”
Other public disagreements abounded. The German-born Princeton philosopher Jan-Werner Müller tells me that while we may live “in an era when the term illiberal democracy is uncritically accepted by many observers (never mind the self-promoting autocrats), [Habermas’s] robust theory of how basic rights (liberalism, rule of law) and democracy are indissolubly linked remains particularly important. Moreover,” Müller continued, “his way of engaging with other positions also remains a model (though maybe not for everyone). While fiercely polemical in many of his newspaper interventions, in the academic work, he really tried to get inside other theories and synthesize wherever possible. We can’t all work like this, but the sense that you push forward the project of enlightenment together with others has become unusual in academic contexts with evidently too much careerism.”
Over the seven decades of his public prominence, Habermas involved himself in more historical controversies than most people can remember. He originally supported the student and antiwar movements of the late 1960s and early ’70s, until they devolved into what he deemed to be violent nihilism and so condemned them. He supported NATO’s war against Serbia in Kosovo. (Michael Walzer reminds me that Habermas called it “illegal but morally necessary.”)
A champion of European integration, he was extremely critical in the 2010s of Germany’s harsh treatment of debtor nations and of the rest of Europe’s turning away of migrant populations escaping the chaos of their collapsing countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. More recently, he supported military aid to Ukraine, but of his native Germany, he worried that “the armament process seems to be acquiring a momentum of its own.” Habermas noted that what “really irked me” were the “bellicose reflexes” and “highly emotionalized war mentality” in a country that had worked so hard “to achieve the necessary critical distance from our own nationalistic past.”
Quite late in life, Habermas found himself on the wrong end of more criticism than perhaps he had ever faced before when, roughly five weeks after October 7, 2023, he signed a statement arguing that Israel’s military retaliation was “justified” and that “Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist are central elements worthy of special protection in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi era” and that “despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population … the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” Much of the left erupted in a combination of fury and disappointment. Antony Palackal, a professor of sociology at the University of Kerala, called Habermas’s position “a profound crisis in the framework of Critical Theory, exposing a rift between his philosophical ideals and his historical identity.”
Susan Neiman, head of Berlin’s Einstein Forum, spoke for many when she wrote me: “As a philosopher who insisted on the importance of the public sphere for democracy, Habermas’s greatest contributions may have been his own involvement in it. He wrote and spoke publicly on virtually every matter of significance in postwar Germany, often challenging majority opinions,” and “his often-courageous engagement in all sorts of matters remain very much to his credit.” But Neiman, like many of Habermas’s admirers in left and liberal circles, was disappointed, to put it mildly, by what she calls his defense of the “standard German consensus that the nation’s commitment to atone for the Holocaust requires unconditional support for the state of Israel no matter what. The national defender of reason and universalism might have tried to convince his countryfolk that atoning for World War II means defending human rights and upholding international law, wherever they are threatened; no one else had the stature to do so.” The issue was apparently so painful for Habermas that, when asked about Gaza by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins for The Nation last year, the philosopher not only declined to respond but abruptly ended the interview.
At his core, Habermas believed, as he told one interviewer late in life: “If there is any small remnant of utopia that I’ve preserved, then it is surely the idea that democracy is capable of hacking through the Gordian knot of otherwise insoluble problems. I’m not saying we’re going to succeed in this; we don’t even know whether success is possible. But because we don’t know, we still have to try.”
In words that feel precious to leftists all across the world, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called upon the rest of us to demonstrate our “optimism of the will,” in spite of our “pessimism of the intellect.” In these dark days, one cannot help but find inspiration in the man who, as well as anyone, managed to live those words.
