In Memoriam: Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026) - The Last European

A philosopher might scoff at being called a good man but Jürgen Habermas was an angel. None of that is a contradiction in terms since the German philosopher and social theorist was a paradox to his teachers, peers, students and disciples, and the public that still cared to think. Born in Düsseldorf on June 18, 1929, he had to join the Hitler Youth at 10. His father was a major in the Wehrmacht and a Nazi Party member. At 15, Habermas himself escaped being sent to the collapsing Western Front between fall 1944 and February 1945 by the skin of his teeth. He grew up to not only reflect on and understand the world tumult of his nascence but also come to terms with the past: his and his country’s.

Coming to terms with the past, or Vergangenheitsbewältigung, has been post-war Germany’s official preoccupation. And yet, the then-greatest living German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, was typically incapable of coming to terms with his own past. When Heidegger’s Nazi-era works were republished in the 1950s, Habermas found in them a Nazi apologist and publicly excoriated the mentor, teacher and one-time lover Hannah Arendt had defended despite knowing he was a Nazi.

Habermas’ public debates or battles were as famous as he was. Soon after taking on Heidegger, he went to work for Theodor Adorno at the Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research, University of Frankfurt). Adorno hadn’t exactly said what was mythicised in English along the lines of “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” What Adorno had written in his 1949 essay was: Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch—which literally translates closer to “It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” But Habermas couldn’t buy into the fatalism inherent in the critical theory of Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the director of the Frankfurt School who had been removed by the Nazis and reinstated after the war.

Habermas was already a paradox: a rising postmodernist who refused to give up on the Enlightenment and reason, clinging to the former as a kind of “grand narrative” that was anathema to the postmodern left. Having analysed the barbarity of the Nazi era to the bone and urging accountability for the deeds of the past and the need to keep the memory of such deeds alive, Habermas would be very worried by the rise of nationalism in Europe again. As a result, the neoconservative right didn’t like him either. The German far-right, if it cared to read, would have hated him. Habermas himself loved the European integration project and saw the European Union as a still-possible salvation for the bloodied continent and a developing example of how people could live and work with people, nation with nation, race with race—as long as society allowed the dialogic process to work.

Ironically, this was not turning reason into an inviolate and universal truth but an instrument that could be deployed to help conversation, keep societies plural, and save them from repeating the twin 20th-century totalitarian disasters of fascism and communism and their accompanying genocides. Habermas did not despair of modernity and consumerism unlike his mentors at Frankfurt but he did come to connect the dangers of both global capitalism and ethno-nationalism. That’s exactly where the European project came in—as a defence of democracy against forces that try to disrupt, demarcate and turn the world into mutually antagonistic silos. But for this to succeed, the conversation had to go on—dialogically, mutating, adapting, evolving, pluralising itself. There was yet no reason to give up on progress.

To make his lifetime’s case, Habermas bequeathed us the “public sphere”.

The public sphere was, of course, not his invention. It is as old as civilisation. But what Habermas had in mind as he wrote the thesis that later turned into the book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) was more specific: the 18th-century middle of the Enlightenment when people in societies with a rising bourgeoisie, such as Britain and France, supplied with newspapers and equipped with more than mere literacy, could meet and talk about politics in, say, coffeehouses. For Habermas, these exchanges were grounded in reason and over time became a means of identifying and resolving problems. Such dialogue was, again, fundamentally democratic and helped define more sharply the contours of modern society.

This insistence on conversation and consensus didn’t win Habermas admirers on the right either. His admonition to never forget Nazism, to never relativise the Holocaust, his long-running war with revisionist German historians went right back to what he learnt from the Nuremberg trials. His later attempts to find compromise between a post-secular European society and the growth of Islam on the continent were less successful, perhaps partly because of a flawed premise: both sides have to broadly subscribe to the same set of values to have a productive conversation.  

Habermas had overseen the transition of the Frankfurt School after taking over from Horkheimer in 1964 as a new generation of scholars and students passed through its portals, born after the war. He also headed the Max Planck Institute for a decade and continued lecturing across continents long after his retirement in 1994.

What Habermas reinstated in thinking about human societal evolution was “hope”. He refused, ultimately, to give up on our species. The survival of the European Union was important to him for this reason as well. It would be proof of democratic resilience; it would be evidence of people’s ability to talk their differences out. He was, as he was often called, the last European. Sadly, when he died on March 14 at 96, Europe, the world and the future of humanity looked bleaker than at any time since 1945.