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In Memoriam: Jurgen Habermas (1929-2026)

Brian Leiter

Professor Habermas was the transitional figure between the original Frankfurt School of critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse and its modern manifestation as normative moral and political philosophy, of the kind familiar in the Anglophone tradition. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Habermas or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

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6 responses to “In Memoriam: Jurgen Habermas (1929-2026)”

  1. s. wallerstein

    Never read any Habermas. Read almost all of Marcuse and a lot of Adorno as well as a couple of books on the Frankfurt School. Never read Habermas because from what you (Brian) say about his work, Habermas wasn’t going where I’m going.

    However, I see that social media is overflowing with praise for Habermas’s greatness, comments often coming from folks who I suspect know even less about philosophy than I do.

    So it seems that people confuse being well-known and famous (as Habermas was) with greatness. All that in a society where first of all, the media, which decide who to promote to fame or not, are not especially knowledgeable about philosophy and second, where the media have evident biases in favor of thinkers who rationalize or justify the status quo.

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    1. AG Tanyi

      Media hype cuts neither way, though. It doesn’t show for sure that he was an important thinker. Nor does it show that he wasn’t, though.

      He certainly was an influential theorist in Europe. Whether he was right is another matter. I sympathize with many of his thoughts but never was a huge fan of his theory of communicative action (in which, one should note, he had a partner in crime: Karl-Otto Apel).

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  2. Espen Hammer

    A towering figure of the post-World War II era in European philosophy and social/political theory. An unflinching proponent of enlightenment and radical democracy, and an engaged intellectual who deeply shaped German culture. A patient, generous man of encyclopedic knowledge. It feels like the end of an epoch.

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  3. Liam Egan

    I am only a graduate student, but I have been reading Habermas for about a decade now, and his work has been formative for my intellectual development, so I thought I might say a few words.

    I have always thought of Habermas as the greatest philosopher of the post-war liberal order, in all the varied and ambiguous senses of this genitive. Each and every one of his books was — directly or indirectly — an attempt to think how the institutions of liberal democracy in Europe and beyond might, as Hegel would have put it, rise to the level of their concept. It is hard to avoid the thought that his death marks an epochal shift from an age when this aspiration seemed implausibly idealistic to one in which its realization seems manifestly impossible.

    For the longest time, I read Habermas as more radical than (I now suspect) he actually was. After all, the English titles of his books from the 70s were, presumably at the behest of his Anglophone publishers, irritatingly de-Marxified in translation. The work whose German title literally translates as “Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism” was given the anodyne English title “Legitimation Crisis,” while large portions of his “Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus” (“Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism”) only appeared in an English volume titled “Communication and the Evolution of Society.” These books, along with the Theory of Communicative Action that followed them, were serious attempts to reanimate and reactualize the Marxist critique of capitalism a century after its original formulation — more so than, say, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has always struck me as far more Nietzschean and Weberian than Marxist. The final chapter of the second volume of the TCA, which puts forward the thesis of “the colonization of the lifeworld” by the systematic imperatives of capitalist reproduction, is one of the most ingenious and suggestive stretches of argument I have encountered in any book, and I have long lamented that Habermas largely abandoned, or at least sidelined, this thesis in his subsequent work as he turned towards more straightforwardly normative issues.

    Of course, his Kantian universalism could be irritatingly provincial, indicative more of the social and political conditions of West Germany than the species-wide historical achievement he took it to be. And his particular political interventions were not infrequently infuriating. Had his co-authored statement on the war in Gaza (which he and his co-authors claimed to be “justified in principle”) been published the day after October 7th, it would have been astonishingly (though predictably) naive; published as it was in mid-November of 2023, after the indiscriminate killing of nearly fifteen thousand Palestinians (two thirds of them women or children), it was unforgivable.

    Thus I have come to think that all the usual criticisms of Habermas — too rationalistic, too Kantian in his moral outlook while too Hegelian in his philosophy of history, too sanguine about the existing world order, etc. — were never entirely off the mark. Yet despite his blind spots, the world feels a great deal poorer without his unrelentingly universalizing and humanistic spirit; the “universal voice” of which Kant spoke that resounds from his writings scarcely seems possible anymore. I fear that the world to come will fall back behind, rather than overcome, his failings.

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  4. LFC

    Habermas had a wide range; he could expound on the classical social theorists (as he did, for example, in parts of _The Theory of Communicative Action_) and also engage with contemporary philosophers (e.g., his exchange with Rawls in _The Journal of Philosophy_ in 1995). His key ideas (e.g., undistorted communication) will probably have a long life.

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  5. Leslie Glazer

    it is easy to be a critic of Habermas. It is difficult to be a defender of the enlightment and liberalism in the intellectual climate we are embedded in. Habermas tried to. Is that a fault? His passing is the end of an error. Public intellectuals like Pinker and Harris, whatever one thinks of them, do not have the intellectual resources to counter the intellectual forces around us. Habermas again, tried to. I am not sure his ideal of communicative action and the ideals can succeed. But, it was a novel way to try to critique the problems of capitalism and what gets in the way of democracy. The problems are those factors and forces that get in the way of the ideal communicative intersubjective situation, and the solutions are those that support the thriving of that ideal situation. Perhaps too abstract and too idealistic. But commendable. For as we see, without something like that we drift into fascism on the one side or postmodernism on the other. Both of which were Habermas’ opponents. Both of which lead into our post-truth post liberal/illiberal society— and do so without real resources for creating anything like a just society.

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