What Jürgen Habermas leaves behind
Germany has lost its most important public intellectual; the world will have to do without one of its most influential philosophers. Jürgen Habermas’s death at the age of 96 comes at a time when the political culture he fostered in his own country is being put under serious pressure; what’s more, his philosophical vision of “friendly co-existence” – freundliches Zusammenleben – seems utterly unrealistic in an era when culture wars both within and across states are tearing people apart. Long-standing reservations about his work, especially from the left – too rationalist, too consensus-oriented, too liberal, too starry-eyed about historical progress – are being revived. Meanwhile, the provocateurs promoting a “Dark Enlightenment” do not even bother with one of the most eloquent defenders of the actual Enlightenment. As his close friend, the filmmaker Alexander Kluge, put it, Habermas realised full well that we are living a dangerous moment – and that we have to get busy in the philosophical workshop. For that, some of his tools remain indispensable.
Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929. The decisive intellectual break in his life was perhaps not so much the liberation from Nazism in 1945 itself, but his realisation in the early 1950s that the mentalities which had enabled Nazism persisted – and that plenty of figures whose oeuvre he admired were unrepentant about their complicity. Habermas – who initially had wanted to work as a journalist – burst onto the scene with a newspaper article criticising Martin Heidegger for publishing work that still referenced the “inner greatness” of the Nazi movement. Habermas, who ended up writing newspaper essays for more than seven decades, would never lose his instincts for when to start as debate, whom to pick as an adversary – and how to sharpen intellectual and moral oppositions polemically.
He made it part of his philosophical agenda to get rid of Tiefsinn – the German word for a sense of philosophical profundity, which could easily translate into political blindness. He joined the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research – also known as “the Frankfurt School” – attracted by its imperative to combine theoretical with empirical social scientific work, all in the service of a larger progressive purpose; rather than philosophy sitting on the throne of Wissenschaft (academia as a whole), it should assist with different forms of interdisciplinary work. Habermas turned out to be too radical for the doyens of the School, Theodor W Adorno and, in particular Max Horkheimer. They considered reminders about the Marxism at the heart of the School’s initial program inconvenient when West Germany was living through an economic boom (and when the Institute was hoping for donations from German industrialists). Habermas thus sought academic supervision from the only Marxist professor teaching in the Federal Republic at the time, Wolfgang Abendroth.
The book that resulted – The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – remains one of Habermas’s landmark contributions; no course in media studies, no discussion of the threats generated by social media today, will do without reference to it (it is also his best-selling book). Habermas offered a stylised history of how citizens had come together in French salons and British coffee houses in the 18th century, first to discuss and judge literature and then to judge politics. Public opinion became a key component of modern democracies, in which governments could no longer just represent themselves before the people (as monarchs had done), but had to be sensitive to the social problems which people talking to each other had identified.
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Decades later, he would sum up the work’s key insight with a memorable image: the communicative power generated by countless debates in civil society is comparable to laying siege to the official seats of power, parliament remaining the most important. The point is not actually to conquer – or to abolish – representative political institutions, but to alert them to what one of the central clichés of our time would have as “grievances”. (Of course, one can wonder whether the metaphor of a “siege” needs to be retired after 6 January 2021 in the US and 8 January 2023 in Brazil.)
Habermas learnt how communication can generate a form of power from Hannah Arendt, whom he had visited in New York, one of many sojourns to the US. His battle against Tiefsinn made him advocate for a comprehensive “opening” to Western intellectual traditions (previously derided by many German mandarins as superficial). “The West” clearly meant North America; Habermas always found British academic and political culture alien (his oeuvre was also most memorably sneered at by Quentin Skinner and another Cambridge don, Raymond Geuss). Habermas was visibly uncomfortable when visiting Oxford; he disliked being called a “liberal” (“liberalism” to him meant John Stuart Mill and assorted anti-communist Cold War thinkers, all insufficiently sensitive to the social pathologies created by capitalism). When Habermas made European integration a major cause of his public intellectual work in the 1990s, he could not help but being annoyed by the Brits always dragging their feet.
Habermas struggled with the challenge of moving beyond Marxism and giving the Frankfurt School – also known as Critical Theory – something like a secure normative foundation. His major work of 1981, The Theory of Communicative Action, sought such a foundation in language itself, but failed to generate the kind of concrete research program for which he had hoped. The idea that discussion should be open to all affected by a political decision, and that a decision would only be legitimate if all properly had agreed to it, remained crucial though, as he began to work more directly in legal and political theory during the 1980s.
The major insight that emerged from this period was that democracy and basic rights were, as he put it, “co-original”: one could not really be had without the other. This was an important lesson for his compatriots. Germans had long idealised the notion of the Rechtsstaat, the rule of law, in isolation, which is to say, without messy democracy (the rule of law had also been considered compatible with monarchy). But arguments about the indissoluble connections between liberalism and democracy have acquired new urgency in our era, when self-declared “illiberal democrats” like Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán insist that they are perfectly good democrats (in fact better democrats than their liberal critics), but committed anti-liberals at the same time. Not for nothing did Orbán once call a volume by Habermas “the most dangerous book in Europe”.
Habermas also got stuck with the label “rationalist”; he supposedly held that consensus was guaranteed to emerge from unconstrained rational discussions. He himself regretted ever having used the expression “ideal speech situation” – which made it easy for detractors to claim that we are hardly ever in that situation, and that a naïve professor was projecting the ethics of the seminar room onto the sordid world of politics. In the eyes of a different set of critics, he made far too many concessions to state power and capitalism, which he thought could not be fundamentally democratised.
In actual fact, Habermas wanted public spheres to be “wild”, even “anarchic”. He was also alert to aesthetics, and even mysticism, in ways often missed by his readers in the English-speaking world. Instead, the sentiment best (or most nastily) expressed by Gilles Deleuze when he called Habermas a “bureaucrat of pure reason” became a lazy default take on the German thinker.
Those who experienced him up close witnessed a man combining non-negotiable seriousness with deeply felt passions, even a certain impulsiveness; it was not altogether surprising when Habermas revealed to a recent biographer that his interventions in newspapers had almost always been inspired by “anger”. Habermas paid very close attention to his interlocutors, irrespective of academic hierarchies; people who observed him on his many visits to the US could see a global philosophical star, but not a guru. He was also extraordinarily sensitive about psychological injuries (plenty of biographers have suggested that this must have had something to do with his cleft palate and the bullying he suffered as a consequence – which also explains why he always shunned radio and television and preferred to do interviews in writing).
It has become conventional wisdom in recent years that Habermas’s ideals were being repudiated by the ugly politics of our century. His home country has seen the consolidation of a far-right party shamelessly engaged in relativising National Socialism – something he had fought against in a famous debate with conservative historians in the 1980s (his own explanation for the success of populism was thoroughly economic). The European project which he had envisaged as a counterweight to Anglo-American neoliberalism was stalling; and the vision of a cosmopolitan order in which international law constrained potentially violent nation-state sovereignty appeared in tatters even before Trump’s second term. His essays warning of German militarisation in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine also led to unusually hostile reactions; at best, younger critics felt that he was too eager not to repeat the anti-Russian sentiments prevalent during the Cold War (and stoked by the racism of the Nazis in his youth).
Towards the end of his life, Habermas did indeed worry that the West’s decline might have become unstoppable – and that the EU would not be able to dissociate itself from a Trumpified US in time. Yet he kept writing, with what he called Vernunfthoffnung – a hope that reason might prevail, and that even a public sphere profoundly transformed by the internet might serve as a site of meaningful dialogue. Younger figures on the left faulted him for having said the wrong thing about Gaza, and for constituting a Frankfurt version of Fukuyama (instead of persisting with a push for “radical democracy”). Meanwhile, Habermas’s allies had reason to despair that Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality were being challenged not by profound anti-democrats like Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and brilliant followers of Nietzsche, as had been the case during the 20th century, but by bargain basement bloggers like Curtis Yarvin, who sell what they have read on Wikipedia ten minutes earlier as Tiefsinn.
Some of us will probably always talk about Habermas the way Habermas talked about Adorno: I recall him telling me that Adorno really had been a genius and that he had loved him. Then again, Habermas considered Geniekult – cult of genius – yet another pernicious German tradition, and it is fair to say that he wanted his immense oeuvre to be seen as just part of a collective work-in-progress, as a moment in a never-ending “learning process” (one of his favourite concepts). The task now is neither venerating an intellectual giant nor indulging what often amount to cheap leftist shots, but instead to save, test, and develop the ideas and concepts he left us for confronting a new dark age.
[Further reading: Marxism can still change the world]
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