This piece was originally published on June 26, 2019. We are republishing it to mark the death of Jürgen Habermas on March 14, 2026.
In a country where anniversaries are protracted affairs, the 90th birthday of Germany’s leading philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, would not go unnoticed. newspapers time cost a surcharge for assessments; the ministers of culture were included in his backward list. His lecture at Frankfurt’s Goethe University in June was delivered to around 3,000 people. It brought back memories for older members of the audience: the philosopher made his name there as an assistant to Theodor Adorno, carving out his arguments to students who had been stripped of any utopian commitment by World War II—or, later, against students who took their utopian visions beyond what he thought was required.
Still nimble in the lectern, his black sneakers flitting back and forth, switching between two pairs of glasses, Habermas did not disappoint his audience. Did his audience let him down? Maybe. Instead of a standing ovation, you could tell he would have preferred a smart student to stand up and ask a question. The most appropriate birthday present may have come from Habermas’ publishing house, Suhrkamp Verlag, which published a fairly detailed study of his early thought by a young historian born in the GDR.
Like Kant, Habermas believes in the liberating capacity of reason; that its purpose is to help us arrive at ways to live better together. When people discuss together, under non-dominant conditions, there is an assumption that it is possible to reach a consensus, with what Habermas calls “the pressureless pressure of the best argument”. That almost no argument in real life is really like this is part of Habermas’s point: we know that some conversations approach these conditions more than others, and only in more or less uncommitted conversations is any real agreement possible.
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Like Hegel, Habermas has an extremely elaborate “philosophy of history” for a liberal. He believes that history, through our use of reason within it, is moving in a certain direction, although it lacks a definite end. The direction is post-national, towards a world economy defined by social democratic characteristics. Habermas’ way of thinking about rationality as a causal agent in world affairs and a way of interpreting causal change has seemed untenable to some of his readers.
Finally, like Marx, Habermas believes that the main obstacles to our free use of reason are the forces of domination associated with the latest version of capitalism, which closes the gap between speech and power and makes the very idea of the “general interest” unthinkable.
Outside Germany, Habermas has received his most sympathetic hearing in the US, where many of his most creative interpreters have lived and taught, including Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser and Richard Rorty. In Britain, by contrast, there seems to be a constant lottery to see who can write the weirdest part about it. Two claims are usually thrown his way: that his prose is unreadably abstract, and that his career has faithfully reflected the evolution of West Germany and now, the united Federal Republic.
Neither of these is true. Habermas has written some of the best polemical prose in postwar Germany (vindication can only come when his 12 volumes Small political writings published in English). The familiarity that any half-conscious German grammar school graduate has with Habermas’s political concepts—from “constitutional patriotism” to the “ideal speech situation”—makes his position in European letters seem far greater than a figure confined to academia such as the American philosopher John Rawls.
Habermas was born in Düsseldorf in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash. His father was a member of the Nazi party and, like Günter Grass and many of his generation, Habermas served in the Hitler Youth. Not from 1968, but from 1945, Habermas was among the first young Germans for whom the war provided a conversion experience away from nationalism. He later believed that this process of re-education had made Germany uniquely suited to a vanguard role in a post-nationalist political project.
Today it is difficult to appreciate how brave Habermas was at the time. He saw signs of right-wing survival and resurgence all around him: in the American rearmament of Germany and the anti-communist purge of universities. His first public writing condemned the cynicism in the expressionist poetry of Gottfried Benn. Still in his twenties, he attacked Heidegger for republishing a work from the Nazi period without considering his contribution and implication in the war. In the cultural war against atavistic Nazism, Habermas became a hero in the student movement before it radicalized beyond his taste.
Over the years, some of his positions have been more open to question: he was against the establishment of a Green Party in West Germany (he thought that its reformist wing or its fundamentalist wing would win and neutralize the social value of the party) and he was lukewarm towards reunification (he thought that West Germany would use the opportunity to cement its political-economic way, not to subject to introspection).
Today Habermas has placed all his world historical chips on the EU. In a recent series of debates with Wolfgang Streeck, Habermas made some questionable statements. He has referred to European monetary union as the “cunning of economic reason” for providing the technological foundation required for a global society. He described Emmanuel Macron as someone who “stands out above the European leadership because he assesses every current issue from a wider perspective and is therefore not merely reactionary”. Whether this perspective is the vantage point of global capital or that of the future of humanity seems at least an open question.
But Habermas is right to think that any retreat from the left to the citadel of the nation-state is likely to be doubly disappointed: not only by the populist right, for which the nation has always been a cup against others, but also by the capacity of the capitalist class to adapt to the new nationalism.
At the after-party on the roof deck of one of the buildings at the University of Frankfurt, the symbolism was hard to miss. The Bundesbank flanked one side of the building in the distance, Goldman Sachs the other. In between, Habermas sat huddled in a chair with his wife, waiting for guests from all over the world.
Marx, borrowing from Hamlethad the “old mole” of the revolution; Hegel Minerva’s owl that flies alone at dusk. At the podium, Habermas closed his speech with an image that instantly seemed canonical. The mole of reason, he said, is blind only in the sense that it can discern the resistance of an unsolved problem, without knowing whether there will be a solution; but it is stubborn enough to advance in the underground passages.
Thomas Meaney is a fellow at the Max Planck Society, Göttingen
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