The City of Frankfurt, its university, and the publishing house Suhrkamp are in the midst of planning a conference about his remarkable work. Conversations in the German public about the planned conference raise the role of Habermas’s work in shaping the post-1960 center-left public consensus in Germany’s Federal Republic. Indeed, the institutional players organizing the conference are the heirs of the “long march through the institutions.” The socialist activist Rudi Dutschke propagated this idea in 1967, arguing that to change the government, the revolution must become part of it. The person who perhaps best exemplifies the “long march” is the retired Green Party politician Joschka Fischer, who rose from socialist activist to Vice Chancellor. Thus, it is not surprising that the current discussions about Habermas revolve around the question of whether he was something like a state philosopher for the Federal Republic. Was the trajectory of his work like the career of Joschka Fischer?
Habermas became, over the long decades of his life, not only a public intellectual but something like the public consciousness of the Federal Republic, a state that constantly worried about its political and democratic legitimacy. Beginning in 1953, when Habermas called attention to Heidegger’s continued Nazi sympathies, followed in the 1960s, when he sharply critiqued the revolutionary strategies and theories of the student revolution, into the twenty-first century, he accompanied the Federal Republic through its recurring political and moral crises: debates over the meaning of the Holocaust for German political identity, arguments over armed intervention in the Balkans, the refugee crisis, and, most recently, the war in Ukraine. Emblematic of his role as protector of Germany’s democratic self-understanding is that a German newspaper enthuses that Habermas’s home was “part of the foundations of Germany’s recent democratic history.”
But is Habermas in this extolled role as consciousness of German democracy a true heir to the Frankfurt School, the Institute for Social Research, and its Marxist legacy? Did he preserve this legacy while marching through the institutions of the Republic?
So the question (re)appears whether Habermas’ philosophy has bleached out Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s vision of finding ways to free humanity from coercion and dominance. Did his emphasis on speech pragmatics and his goal of finding structures of governance arising from them abandon Marxist analytics and a commitment to revolution? Is Gerhard Schweppenhäuser’s diagnosis correct that Habermas’s project was to leave Marx (and Horkheimer and Adorno) behind to build Max Weber’s “theorem of the progression of Western rationalization into a universalizing theory and ethics of communication?”
This worry aligns with Azar Dakwar’s reflections about Habermas’ myopic reliance on Karl Jaspers’s idea of an axial age as the source of an unfolding of alleged universal rationality. Yet, as we can see in Siobhán Garrigan’s reflections, there may be more liberatory and anticapitalist power in a theology informed by Habermas that Schweppenhäuser’s analysis makes us think. Finally, Christina Lafont reminds us that Habermas’s commitment to an ideal community of speech was grounded in his particular humanity. His philosophy reflected who he was as a Mensch in relation to another in a type of communication that Karl Löwith described in Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen. Not only did Habermas systematize this form of communicating, but Lafont lets us see that he lived it.
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Azar Dakwar
Postdoctoral Associate in Theology and Religious Studies
KU Leuven
Jürgen Habermas should be remembered not only as the last of the herculean tradition of Protestant thought (secularized or not), but as a thinker who tried, with unwavering determination, to save reason from its scandalous nature. It is widely held that his lifelong defense of communicative rationality and liberal cosmopolitanism gave postwar Germany, and the West more generally, one of its most potent vocabularies of self-criticism. Yet the grandeur of that project was also its limitation: Habermas trusted the redeeming force of (post-)secular rational procedure over the enduring validity of imperial power, racialized histories, resentment, and mass media manipulations. This unproblematized leap of faith is clearest in his later writings on the Occidental constellation of faith and knowledge, religion, and the post-secular condition.
While Habermas’s later thought sought to correct a narrow secularism by admitting that “religious traditions” sourced from the Axial Age preserve moral intuitions which modern societies may still need, this “generosity” was thoroughly prejudiced. Religious faith should be heard, but only if it channels the wisdom of Axial Age religions and penetrates the rigorous translation filters of the secularized public sphere. This account of the post-secular was not only Eurocentric (a fact he partially conceded) but also dismissive of the colonial confounding of the secular standpoint beyond Europe and the civilizational relevance of Islam (see the glaring omission in his late magnum opus Also a History of Philosophy). His argument enters particularly treacherous waters when, in attempting to salvage epistemological resources within historical religions, it relies on an unlikely account of Judeo-Christianity as a continuous single tradition. In short, Habermas’s (post-)secular horizon emerges as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it is a horizon with either no genuine history or a history that is inherently improbable.
At the bottom of the anxieties animating Habermas’s redemptive republicanism is a righteous preoccupation with Germany’s moral standing in the aftermath of the Holocaust and its utter mismatch with an enlightened and progressive self-conception – which he believes is historically redeemable. Habermas’s urge to salvage the Enlightenment tradition in the German context (over against the Sonderweg narrative) proceeds from singularizing the event of Auschwitz and its emblematic Jewish victims as the litmus test of any emancipatory social theory worthy of the designation “critical.” As Martin Beck Matuštík argues, Auschwitz functions as a wounded attachment that cuts across Habermas’s formative experiences, intellectual interventions, and political identity. The overwhelming memory of this historical catastrophe and Habermas’s staunch hope that some redemptive potentiality remains within our rational resources to overcome it suffuse the unsatisfactory and tenuous character of Habermas’s post-national republicanism, communicative rationality, and ethics.
Given the gravity of the moment we are living through, it is fitting to remember Habermas’s political-theological legacy by piercing into its “film negative.” Here, Quentin Skinner’s 1982 evaluation of Habermas’s reformative project remains apt: “It is disconcerting to see how far his assumptions and vocabulary merely recast a traditional story of deliverance in secular modern dress. We are surely entitled to something more rigorous from our social philosophers than a continuation of Protestantism by other means.”
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Christina Lafont
Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy
Northwestern University
This is an immeasurable loss for so many people, for so many reasons, and for so many causes that remain as urgent as ever in these dangerous times. Jürgen Habermas has left us when we needed him most: as the strongest philosophical defender of democracy; as the most unwavering public intellectual in his commitment to the values of the Enlightenment, to a politically integrated European project, and to a cosmopolitan global order; and as a relentless moral conscience in the face of the most threatening political circumstances. We had grown used to him fighting our fights, speaking for all of us, and sticking out his neck regardless of the consequences. We knew he would continue the struggle on all fronts—philosophical, intellectual, and political. And he did. He was, and remains, indispensable.
For me, too, his passing is an immeasurable loss. He stood at the center of my political and intellectual life for as long as I can remember. I first heard of Jürgen Habermas when I was sixteen. I began reading him at twenty, became his doctoral student at twenty-seven, and later his colleague when he visited my university each year during the 1990s and early 2000s. I have remained in dialogue with him—with his work and his thinking—ever since.
None of this was natural or predictable. In fact, the odds that I would become his doctoral student were very small. When I first arrived in Germany with a grant from Spain’s newly elected Socialist government, I felt utterly out of place. I was a young woman in a deeply male-dominated discipline—indeed, for years I was his only female graduate student. I came from Spain, a country where forty years of Franco’s dictatorship had largely extinguished any philosophical or intellectual life. And without the comfort of expressing myself in my native language, like everyone else around me, my plan was simple: learn as much as I could and return to Spain as soon as possible. After all, I told myself, the good thing about philosophers is that you can read them back home; you do not need to stick around.
I went to Frankfurt because of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. But I stayed there so long because of the human being, Jürgen Habermas. It turned out that he was not only an extraordinary philosopher. He was also an extraordinary person—a Mensch. He was, in fact, the most supportive, attentive, and understanding mentor a graduate student could hope for. Even today, after decades in the profession, I often feel that I fall short of the standard he set as a mentor.
Habermas is often mocked for his allegedly naïve belief in the “unforced force of the better argument.” But in my own case, I experienced first-hand what it means to believe in that principle. In one of his final lectures before retirement, Habermas presented an interpretation of Heidegger that happened to be the exact opposite of the one I was defending in my dissertation, which I was then writing in Spanish to be defended at my university in Spain. Because I struggled to express myself in German—let alone to discuss Heidegger in it—I sent him a letter instead. In it I pointed to several passages from Being and Time that, I argued, seemed to contradict the claims he had made in his lecture. At the time, he barely knew who I was. I was simply one of the many visiting students who attended his colloquium—one who almost never spoke, on top of it. To my complete surprise, when we met to talk about Heidegger, he offered to serve as my dissertation advisor. I was so petrified that I politely declined. He simply replied: “If you can argue so well, I must read what you write. And for that, it would be good if you could write it in German—so that we can all read it.” He knew nothing of any special credentials, achievements, or recommendations attached to this student from Spain. I became his student for one reason only: the arguments were all that mattered. That, in a nutshell, is who Jürgen Habermas was.
Habermas’s passing away is an immeasurable loss. We have lost Jürgen Habermas the Mensch, the public intellectual, the fighter, the colleague, the mentor, the friend. But his legacy lives on in all those who knew him, whom he shaped, and who aspire to live up to the standards he set. Fortunately, his monumental philosophical work remains—open to everyone who wishes to engage with it and make it their own. It is now up to all of us to help steer the world in the better direction he had the courage to imagine and never stopped defending.
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Siobhán Garrigan
Loyola Professor of Catholic Theology
Trinity College, Dublin
I didn’t know Habermas personally, but his early written work has been important to me. I came to The Theory of Communicative Action at the point at which it was being criticised for elitism: modelling more a university seminar than actual political life was one charge, diagnosing distortion but not altering oppressive structures was another. But I also saw in it a prescription for a first step in the struggle for certain sorts of emancipation: setting mutual understanding as a necessary goal and calling out situations where it is absent.
Certainly as it relates to theology, Habermas’s early work opened the door to exposing how certain norms that were said to be benign or, at least, inert were in fact strategies of oppression. Take for example the lived theology of Christian worship, where a priest says, “The Lord be with you!” but doesn’t wait for the congregation’s “And also with you” before ploughing on with his own script. Before Habermas, this was imperfect liturgical enactment; tut tut. After Habermas, this is one technique (among many) whereby clericalism is imposed on the faithful, and the less powerful are silenced in their daily political action.
Habermas thus gave theology a method whereby Christianity’s power-over tendencies could be diagnosed right at the point where they were most frequently denied. But he also gave it some words and phrases which it might yet do well to ponder. Every era must rephrase revelatory truths and ethical projects in that era’s own vocabulary, so that they might be properly understood. Aquinas did this with cause and effect, Rahner with divine self-communication, etc. Is there not a need in today’s world for a nomenclature of divinity as intersubjectivity? (Where subjectivities are ecological and not merely human.) It would undermine the rampant individualism at the core of how political power is designed, and instil a fundamental need for mutuality into our conceptions of power.
Christianity in today’s world, enthralled as it is to the Janus of capitalism and nationalism, fuelled by endemic sexism and racism, might scoff at Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ for its naivety, its idealism. But to imagine something that is greater than the sum of our parts and yet not metaphysically transcendent, with equality of all as its premise and understanding between all as its goal, seems as good a modern description of divinity to me as one might find, and a politically prophetic one at that … even if it is not exactly as Habermas himself intended it to be deployed!
