Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday March 14th, 2026, aged 96. He will henceforth share the anniversary of his death with Karl Marx and Albert Einstein. With his passing the world loses a philosopher, social theorist and public intellectual, who in the opinion of philosopher John Rawls (no less) did more than anyone to explain, protect and promote the inner ideals and actuality of liberal democracy, universal morality, and constitutional law.
His political and philosophical views were the polar opposite of Martin Heidegger, one of the thinkers whose work first inspired the young Habermas to study philosophy. Heidegger was a philosopher of home and hearth, who saw himself as a scion and preserver of a traditional German way of life. He was also a vehement antisemite and card-carrying Nazi. As a relatively unknown 24-year-old student, Habermas publicly rebuked West Germany’s most revered philosopher in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for republishing without apology, an essay that Heidegger had authored in the 1930s which praised “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. Habermas argued that the mass murder of millions could hardly be relegated to a “fatal mistake” in the history of Being as Heidegger implied.
This was the point, in 1953, where Habermas gate-crashed Germany’s political public sphere, though he effectively would become the de facto state philosopher of the Federal Republic. It was also the point at which Habermas’s intellectual career, hitherto shaped by Heidegger’s phenomenology and Friedrich Schelling’s German Idealism, inclined steeply towards the Marxism that he had been reading since his early years, and towards the “critical theory” developed previously by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, which aimed to identify the fundamental thought forms and cultural manifestations of modern capitalism. Thus began Habermas’s lifelong cultural and political project of exposing, criticizing and breaking with, the extant residues of authoritarianism and fascism in the patrician culture, society, and politics of post-War West Germany.
Habermas chose his intellectual and political enemies very carefully. Heidegger, the philosopher, and Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist, both unrepentant Nazis, were at the top of his list. By his lights, they were the chief architects of the reactionary mind-set of a society where though Nazism had been defeated there nonetheless remained adeeply authoritarian, illiberal and anti-democratic spirit. Throughout his career Habermas criticized both the intellectual acolytes and political epigones of such thinkers. Beyond that, Habermas was also highly suspicious of anyone, from Nietzsche onward, he considered a purveyor of irrationalism and counter-enlightenment.
Invited by Adorno to Frankfurt to work as his assistant, Habermas would spend four years at the Institute for Social Research from 1954-8. There he worked on what would become Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In that book he set out to identify and expound the ideal and nascent historical reality of the public sphere [Öffentlichkeit]. He construed the public sphere as an inclusive community of rational equals, which could provide the germ of good society. He advanced the ideas with aim of seeding a latently authoritarian, post-fascist and not fully de-nazified society with the intellectual and cultural values that would lend substance to a liberal democratic constitution that had been grafted by the allies on the stump of a shattered Germany. It was a challenge and antidote to the reactionary mindset then prevalent in the Federal Republic of Germany.
However, his ideas were too radical for the cautious Horkheimer, Director of the Institute, who for various reasons – he wrote on Marx, had a research project on Marxian ideology, and joined in student protests against the Adenauer regime – considered the young philosopher a dangerous Marxist. Rather than accept his Habilitation, Horkheimer instigated Habermas’ departure from the institute. Habermas departed to Marburg to complete his thesis with the political and legal theorist Wolfgang Abendroth, at the time one of the few openly Marxist academics in West Germany. In 1962 Structural Transformation was published to great acclaim, and Habermas eventually found himself, after a brief spell in the philosophy department at Heidelberg, the successor to Horkheimer as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt. In the febrile revolutionary atmosphere of the following years, Habermas produced numerous, though never uncritical, writings on Marxism. He aimed at Transformation of Historical Materialism, as one of his volumes was called, not at its implementation.
As is well-known, Habermas eventually fell out with the student leaders to his left, foremost among them Rudi Dutschke. Habermas, like every member of the institute, including Marcuse, who was more closely aligned with, and sympathetic to the student movement, denied that revolutionary conditions existed. The revolution the students aimed to foment was, in the eyes of their teachers, an illusion. Habermas, like Adorno, also suspected the students’ motives. They did not so much want to reform the university, as to conquer it. Their agitations enacted the very same authoritarianism they wished to supersede. Habermas likened them to “left fascists.”
Eventually, in 1971 Habermas left Frankfurt for the Bavarian town of Starnberg, where he lived and worked as director of the Max Planck Institute for research into conditions of life in the scientific and technological world. He was to lead an interdisciplinary research program on modern society, a job for which, he later admitted, he was not the best suited. But it gave him time and opportunity to research and write his major work of social theory entitled Theory of Communicative Action.
The work marked a redevelopment and departure from the critical theory of his predecessors. He developed the ideas of “communicative action,” and discourse, on the basis of a new and controversial pragmatic theory of meaning. In his view, speech implicitly and unavoidably aims at establishing mutual understanding and agreement or “rationally motivated consensus,” which in modern rationalized societies forms the basis of the social bond. In Volume II, he advances a devastating criticism of the incoherence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s social theory and develops a novel distinction between Lifeworld and System. The former was a form of sociality coordinated by speech and reason. The latter was a form of sociality coordinated by money and power. This allowed him to advance a diagnosis of the fundamental pathology of modern society, the “colonization of the lifeworld by the system,” whereby economic and bureaucratic imperatives percolated into forms of life and spheres of sociality hitherto shielded from them, the effect that both structure and individual were warped by the exigencies of money and power.
Eventually, Habermas left the Max Plank Institute, and returned to Frankfurt University, where he worked until retirement. There he published his second Magnum Opus, a work of political and legal theory, translated into English as Between Facts and Norms. Habermas’ mature work articulates in one way or another the underlying thesis that in modern, Western societies, social bond did not consist in, and could not be adequately explained by, models of contracts, rational choice, and interest maximization. They put flesh on the bone of his underlying contention that the contemporary crises facing the constitutional order of liberal democracies could only be solved by more and better democratic institutions, supported from below by a civil society, in which communication and discourse circulate freely, safeguarded by the legal institutionalization of individual basic rights.
In retirement, Habermas continued to be highly productive. Around the turn-of-the-millennium His research took a novel direction, when he became interested in the ethical, social and political role of religion in post-secular society. He put aside the Weberian assumption which had animated his earlier work, that modernization and rationalization meant secularization. Something was missing in modern society, and it turned out that religion was apt to make good the lack, since religion vouchsafes the values and meaning without which the social institutions and interpersonal bonds would atrophy and die. His renewed reflections culminated in a final work, published in English in three enormous volumes entitled, with a nod to J. G. Herder, Also a History of Philosophy.
Habermas’ academic work is difficult. He had an outlandishly wide range of influences. He read voraciously as a young researcher at the Institute, even more since Horkheimer forbade him from teaching on the grounds of his cleft palate, which had left him with a speech impediment. Not only did he hold a Chair in Philosophy and Sociology, but his philosophical interests had wide horizons.
He worked in the classical German traditions of philosophy and sociology respectively. He developed expertise in moral philosophy, moral and cognitive psychology, applied ethics, philosophy of law, political theory, philosophy of language (especially speech-act theory), psychoanalysis, and American pragmatism to name but a few significant areas. Arguably, the intellectual reach of his work, as well as the volume of it, made him suspect in the eyes of anglophone, analytic philosophers who tended to value high-resolution expertise in narrower, more well-defined areas. Habermas did not stay in his lane.
As an academic writer Habermas was no great stylist. He wrote long, dry works replete with academic jargon. He drew from his bewilderingly broad sources to create theories by means of reassembly and reconstruction. He was, moreover, by no means a sensitive interpreter of texts, and often, to the dismay of intellectual historians, disregarded context. He did not care if he crossed an author’s intentions or refined and retooled their core concepts. When he delved into the work of past theorists, he practiced what he called “historical reconstruction with systematic intent:” that is, he pressed them into the service of the theory he was working on. The great critic of instrumental reason was, ironically, pretty instrumental himself in his intellectual appropriations.
Habermas worked quickly. Patient readers and sensitive interpreters found it hard to catch up. He published work faster than others could read and understand it. Often, he published ideas before they were ready. For example, here is no single complete work on Discourse Ethics. There is instead a plethora of articles on related topics, containing subtle and not-so subtle shifts of position. He tended to sketch key arguments, rather than lay them out stepwise, swiftly working up ideas he found intuitively plausible. For example, he always maintained that the moral principle (U) can be derived formally from the rules of discourse, and his principle of discourse (D). Yet he never once attempted the derivation.
Habermas could be reluctant to take on board criticisms once he had formed a view. For example, he only belatedly acknowledged that truth outstrips even idealized justification in discourse but hesitated to make the range of theoretical alterations that recognition of this fact demanded, for example, to his thesis that there is an analogy between truth and moral rightness. As consequence of all these peculiarities, few scholars were able, and even fewer willing, to take up, and to complete the various projects that made up Habermas’s mature work. To his slight disappointment there exists no Habermas school of philosophy, and there probably never will.
This tells us something about how we should interpret his legacy. Habermas is often labeled a second-generation Frankfurt School thinker. But that designation is fatally misleading, since it implies that there is an overlap or continuity between his thought and that of earlier critical theory. To be sure, he was of a different generation than Adorno and Horkheimer: he was 30 years their junior. True, he was at the Institute for Social Research, as Adorno’s assistant, albeit for a relatively brief period. Yet his work, especially but not only his mature work, can hardly be counted as a version of the same school or tradition of thought. As Habermas himself noted, there was no Frankfurt school of critical theory in the sense of a “consistent doctrine.” Furthermore, he did not share the basic assumptions of his predecessors. Besides, anyone who has read any of Habermas’s mature work can plainly see that the sources, aims and approach, indeed the whole style of theorizing is not so much a continuation of earlier Frankfurt School critical theory as a transformation of it (I once joked that it would be more accurate to label Habermas a first generation Starnberg School thinker, except that there was no such school. There was only him).
The aficionados of earlier critical theory who denounce Habermas’ work as a betrayal of its guiding ideas appear to ignore that Habermas’s work is not meant to be a variant of it. It set out from a different set of assumptions with different aims and intentions. And it served a far more clearly delineated and quite different political agenda: namely the preservation and reform of a liberal constitutional democracy, and the defense of its institutions and underlying enlightenment values.
That said, one of its negative aims, that of exposing, of criticizing and of breaking with latent authoritarian and nationalism elements in post-War German society and culture, did overlap with Adorno’s critical theory, for they shared a similar assessment of the problems besetting Adenauer’s Germany. Even here, though, there are important differences. Where Adorno’s critical theory sought to work through the past in the Freudian sense of the Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,, Habermas’s social theory sought to learn from disaster. He saw the evolution of modern society as a learning process, not as Adorno did, as the latest stage of a negative universal history “from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”
There are some deep and fascinating contradictions in Habermas. He endorses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to his subject. And yet his work is the result of traditional academic desktop research, albeit of a prodigiously individual and eclectic kind. He championed the “unforced force of the better argument” and conceived discourse as intersubjective practice of argument aiming at mutual understanding and reasoned consensus. And yet he could be prickly and defensive about even the most judicious and well-argued objections to his work. And he certainly did not engage his opponents, even those to whom he was comparatively well-disposed, with the aim of understanding their ideas better. He set out to convince them that he was right and they were wrong and often succeeded.
The polemical side to Habermas is manifested most starkly in his “small political writings,” journalism and occasional essays, that together make up over half his oeuvre. They often take the form of polemics. His critique of Dutschke and his fellow student protesters, published in the Frankfurter Rundschau in 1968, was entitled ‘The Phantom Revolution and its Children.’ That was not designed to endear. Nor was his likening the student leaders to “left Fascists.”
Two decades later, Habermas ignited the Historikerstreit in Germany with a pungent polemic against of Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, and Michael Stürmer, for deliberately relativizing and downplaying the significance of the Holocaust. Their aim was to create a more use friendly national history, for the purpose of normalizing Germany’s identity and its role in international affairs.
In both cases Habermas was making a serious point, and in neither case did he pull his punches. The sociologist Heinz Bude once noted, waspishly, that due to his proclivity for polemic, Habermas was in fact more Schmittian in his approach to argument than he was Habermasian. That is an overstatement, of course. But there is something to it. Habermas was principled, stubborn and deeply serious. He relished argument and had a pugnacious and merciless turn of phrase.
Like Habermas’s theories or loath them, and there are still many who loath them, they have to be reckoned with. That alone is testament to their intellectual power and enduring relevance. He leaves us a panoply of important ideas: ideas that are not inventions, so much as discoveries of fragments of reason, buried in the fabric of modern social and political life, albeit in need of clarification and reconstruction. These are: the public sphere; the lifeworld as a sphere of interaction guided by communication and discourse; moral discourse as an inclusive practice of argument between rational equals; moral argument as a reflective practice oriented toward establishing norms that serve everyone’s interests; the de-centered self as an enlarged we-perspective; the two track conception of democracy whereby discourses in civil society channel public reasons to the into the political system, and program legislation and policy in the public interest; and constitutional patriotism. Each of these represents an achievement, in the hard-won development of modern society away from tribal nationalism, authoritarianism, and naked power, towards a liberal constitutional democratic society, based on the rule of law, embedded in an ethos of citizenship consisting in relations of solidarity and mutual recognition between equals. The underlying guiding ideal is an attractive one. And not so much a pipedream as a realistic utopia, that for a decent period in post-War Europe and the US looked within reach. As Habermas put it, reflecting on his own life and times, “things needed to get better” and they did for a while – at least in certain respects.
Does the recent reassertion of populism, polarization and post-truth invalidate those ideals, and render Habermas’s philosophical project a failure, as some of his critics have argued? Not in my view. But just as things got better, things can always get worse again. Habermas knew that well. And, as we see from current events in the US and the Middle East, they have. The lesson is that the gains of modernity, whether democratic legitimacy, universal morality, or de-centred subjectivity, are hard to achieve and easy to lose. But their value and significance to a meaningful collective life, however modest, should not be underestimated.
In 1982 Habermas published a series of lectures entitled Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which he railed against the appropriations of Nietzsche and Heidegger by the French post-structuralist thinkers Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille. He interpreted the broad and then highly fashionable movement of post-modernism as a Trojan horse for the resurgence of irrationalism and counter-enlightenment. I, like many others at the time, thought that a peculiar overreaction. But it turns out that his instinct was not so much wrong, as precipitate. He went too early. The ideas of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt have proven to be the intellectual inspiration for a new wave of explicitly authoritarian, anti-democratic and illiberal theorists in the US; “Furious Minds” as Laura K. Field calls them, like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen and Michael Anton, among other – more openly fascistic – thinkers. Our current situation is thus not so unlike the one that Habermas encountered and opposed. He twice noted that the fate of modern democracy depends on whether the citizens of a mass, complex, differentiated societies could “reignite the embers of a radical-democratic spirit.”. That is a worthwhile aim. And to the extent that it still is ours, Habermas’s work will stand as a modern Pharos, a beacon for liberal constitutional democracy on the one hand, and a watchtower against the rising tides of nationalism and authoritarianism on the other.
