Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher who redefined democracy and justice, dies at 94
Jürgen Habermas has died at a time when so much of what the leading figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School stood for is being sidelined: an anti-fascist foundational orientation, radical democratic engagement, a discourse ethics of truth-seeking, an emphatic vision of Europe, and the ideal of global citizenship.
Admittedly, even during the 1968 student revolt, Habermas was already dismissed by the radical left for his attacks on the student opposition. He claimed to detect a "left-wing fascism" in Rudi Dutschke's strategies, saw the protest movement's tactics as a "pseudo-revolutionary" charade, and dismissed the leaders of the extra-parliamentary opposition as "infantile." In response, the activists occupied his institute and published a collection of essays, The Left Replies to Jürgen Habermas (1968), edited by Oskar Negt. There, they argued that defiance and insubordination were necessary, accusing Habermas of merely appearing progressive as long as the task was to interpret the world differently. One of his sharpest critics at the time, Reimut Reiche, conceded that the revolt in post-fascist West Germany may well have had neurotic traits, but insisted that the demonstrations of rebellious youth served to dismantle authority and collectively liberate. This judgment may still resonate today, though it does not entirely refute Habermas's own cutting remarks—such as his dismissal of Hans Magnus Enzensberger as a "harlequin at the court of the pseudo-revolutionaries"—when viewed in hindsight.
In the Federal Republic, Habermas was more left-wing and rebellious than his mentors Adorno and Horkheimer. He was part of the capitalism-critical Suhrkamp culture of the 1970s and 1980s—one that a present-day culture minister like Claudia Roth might now place under suspicion of "extremism." He inherited Georg Lukács's Marxist-Weberian critique of capitalist rationalization and, after the positivism dispute in 1960s sociology, also criticized the "instrumental" nature of the social sciences. He insisted that theoretical or practical interests in knowledge objectively shape reality. His key works from this period, Knowledge and Human Interests and Technology and Science as 'Ideology' (both published in 1968), laid the groundwork for his later shift toward the study of truth claims and validity in discourse, gradually distancing himself from Marxist references and critical-theoretical hypotheses.
His two-volume magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), remains his defining work. There, he seeks to develop a concept of communicative rationality and posits a theory of society divided into two spheres: the "lifeworld" (broadly conceived as positive) and the "system." Though Habermas acknowledged that he no longer took the "legacy of Western rationalism" for granted, his ideas sparked a fierce debate with Michel Foucault, the leading figure of French theory, whose genealogy of modernity and poststructuralist social analysis took a radically different approach. Unlike Habermas, Foucault was not concerned with advancing or preserving the project of modernity.
For Foucault, reason was not a universal norm governing the subject—as Habermas located it in communicative processes—but rather a product of power-knowledge regimes in the human and social sciences. Foucault also rejected the notion that truth claims and promises of recognition could ever be fully redeemed in ideal discourse. In his view, the truths produced by modernity were inextricably bound to the emergence of its power structures—apparently inescapable. Habermas countered with The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), ultimately labeling Foucault a "young conservative"—a term that, in his usage, carried the implication of "pre-fascist," effectively severing any intellectual dialogue between them.
Jürgen Habermas was the philosophical counterpart to West Germany's Basic Law—a considerable compliment, given that its anti-fascist core was also recognized by the socialist political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth of Marburg, under whom Habermas earned his postdoctoral qualification in 1961 with his influential work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Born into a family classified as Nazi "fellow travelers," Habermas made his first public appearance as a 24-year-old in 1954, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. There, he took aim at Martin Heidegger for republishing his 1935 Nazi-tinged Introduction to Metaphysics without comment—a move Habermas condemned as a "retroactive endorsement of the Nazi regime." From that moment onward, through all of West Germany's major debates, Habermas emerged as a relentless opponent of proto-fascist, militarist, and reactionary thought.
His stance in the 1985 Historikerstreit (Historians' Dispute) is well known. By denouncing Ernst Nolte's relativization of Auschwitz as both "NATO ideology" and an expression of a distinctly German revisionism, Habermas made clear his rejection of two things: the Westbinding foreign policy established under Adenauer and the simultaneous preservation of German mentalities, such as anti-Bolshevism. Later, when some assumed Habermas would, in light of newer debates and research linking colonial experience to state-driven antisemitic persecution and extermination, retreat into an insistence on the Holocaust's singularity and a parochial German culture of remembrance, they were proven wrong. Toward the end of his life, he remained intellectually agile, engaging with global and anti-colonial as well as postcolonial discourses and relating them to the demands of a modern immigration society.
At the same time, he disappointed those who, in the face of Israel's war in Gaza, had hoped for a clear stance from the German philosopher in support of the oppressed Palestinians. Instead, Habermas aligned himself with German raison d'état, arguing that "in light of the Nazi era's mass crimes," Israel's right to exist, Jewish life in Germany, and the commitment to both were particularly sacred principles. He firmly rejected any suggestion that Israel's actions could be attributed genocidal intent. This distinctly German sensitivity led to a backlash from the left—this time, a global left, with figures like Adam Tooze, Nancy Fraser, Quinn Slobodian, and Omer Bartov sharply criticizing Habermas.
And the right? With the exception of Ernst Nolte, it never engaged Habermas in any meaningful way. Today, its strategy is not to debate him but to reshape society until none of his optimistic assumptions remain. Donald Trump—the "unpredictable dealmaker" and "property tycoon," in Habermas's words—alongside his far-right allies, sweeps away all standards of communicative integrity with fake news, systematic lies, and the instrumental use of AI.
Habermas had little faith in the West, even in the context of the Ukraine war. He criticized its short-sightedness and lack of vision, its "failure to take any independent or timely initiative in the face of a war whose protracted and hopeless stagnation the West has helped perpetuate." In 2025, writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he spoke out against Germany's unprecedented rearmament, warning of the "revival of a militaristic mindset that had rightly been thought overcome."
With Habermas, a piece of the old Federal Republic—whose Basic Law at least prohibited wars of aggression—comes to an end. Today, Germany is militarizing at breakneck speed. His voice of dissent will be sorely missed.
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