Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age
You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your e-mail is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing. A glance at the news reveals that the President is continuing to spew lies and obscenities; that a trillionaire is peddling white-supremacist propaganda on a social-media platform he owns; that a chart-topping musical artist is praising Hitler, or apologizing for praising Hitler, or praising Hitler once again. Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.
The person who should have been best able to explain how we got here was the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who illuminated how a feisty, principled public sphere is integral to democracy. But Habermas died in March, at the age of ninety-six, and, although he remained active until his final months, commenting on Ukraine, Gaza, and Eurobonds, he struggled to understand the turn history had taken. As a teen-ager in 1945, he had witnessed American soldiers enter his home town of Gummersbach, near Cologne, carrying messages of freedom and openness. Eight decades later, he watched American voters choose a leader who had advertised his fascistic bent in blood-and-soil rhetoric, fantasies of punitive violence, and a taste for bombastic architectural kitsch. The far right was making inroads across Europe, including in Germany. The print-based media culture that once anchored Habermas’s public sphere had devolved into a digital sludgefest that proved better at circulating racist memes than at fostering morality and dignity. A couple of years before his death, in a conversation with the historian Philipp Felsch, Habermas said that his world was being dismantled “step by step.”
None of this would have surprised a previous generation of German thinkers—the group known as the Institute for Social Research, or the Frankfurt School. The institute emerged in the nineteen-twenties, went into exile during the Nazi period, and returned to Germany after the war. Its leading figures, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, saw capitalist society not as the antithesis of totalitarianism but as its more affable, aw-shucks twin. Citizens become commodities; technology increases the power of an already powerful few; pop culture serves up mechanized slop; truth and lies commingle. Their default mode was apocalyptic: “The fully enlightened Earth glows under the sign of triumphant disaster.” Now, with gig workers frantically self-branding, tech barons amassing unthinkable wealth, algorithms dictating consumption, A.I. infecting reality, and Earth itself turning feverish, Horkheimer and Adorno’s worst-case scenarios begin to seem overly optimistic.
Habermas started out under the aegis of the Frankfurt School, serving as Adorno’s assistant. Yet the group’s fatalism eventually struck him as a repudiation of social purpose—a “strategy of hibernation,” he called it. He similarly resisted the truth-clouding rhetoric of French post-structuralism. He was not ready to give up on the concept of reason articulated in the writings of Immanuel Kant, whose ideal of Menschenwürde, or human dignity, is enshrined in the first lines of the German constitution. Habermas made it his mission to elaborate a modern philosophy of reason, rooted in dialogue and debate, attuned to a pluralistic world. He took his project out of the seminar room and into the political arena, defending democracy, embracing the European Union, and denouncing any resurgence of German nationalism. As a result, he became a cynosure in German politics and a resonant voice abroad. At his peak of influence, around 2000, it was as if a secular pope had been anointed: Habemus Habermas.
An infinite scroll of evidence suggests that Habermas’s last-ditch defense of reason has failed. On both the right and the left, positions are hardening; each tribe has its truth. In a broader sense, Habermas’s death might mark the end of a mode of main-stage philosophizing that, in the German-speaking world, reaches back, by way of Adorno, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, to Kant himself. The age of the Germanic male genius delivering edicts from on high has run its course. Habermas sensed this: he was attempting to move past his discipline’s oracular tradition and encourage a new model of public deliberation, one in which the philosopher serves as mediator, interpreter, conciliator. At the heart of Habermas’s omnivorous, at times contradictory, body of work is an idea as simple as it is profound: in adopting the perspectives of others, we learn to become ourselves.
Triumphant disaster was the sign under which the members of the Frankfurt School lived their lives. In addition to Horkheimer and Adorno, the group included Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, and Walter Benjamin. Most were born around the turn of the twentieth century, into well-to-do, assimilated Jewish families, and their early adulthoods were marked by the bloodbath of the First World War and the revolutionary mayhem that followed. As Philipp Lenhard writes in “Café Marx,” a recent German-language history of the Frankfurt School, these thinkers learned in their youth that “war and barbarism were no ‘workplace accident’ of bourgeois society but instead the result of its intrinsic logic.”
The Institute for Social Research was formed in 1923, under the auspices of Goethe University, in Frankfurt. Early meetings occurred at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum, beneath a diplodocus skeleton and other prehistoric relics. At first, the institute concentrated on earnest Marxian research projects. Then, in 1930, Horkheimer, a brilliant, turbulent man with a melancholic streak, became director and instilled a more intransigent perspective. He took his lead from Pollock, who believed that the modern capitalist state had advanced to the point where its overthrow was no longer a likely prospect. Social-welfare programs had kept the working classes from becoming restive. In the absence of a revolution, Horkheimer called for scholars to focus on the intersection of capitalism, science, technology, and mass culture. He dubbed this new mode of engaged philosophy “critical theory.”
As Lenhard notes, Horkheimer “avoided the term ‘Marxist’ as the Devil avoids holy water.” Still, he retained many of Marx’s core concepts—above all, that of the dialectic. Since Socrates, dialectical thinking had been a method of eliciting truth through questioning and refutation. Hegel redefined the dialectic as a process of assertion, negation, and synthesis that gathers force through history. Marx, in turn, cast the dialectic in economic terms, establishing the emancipation of the proletariat as history’s goal. Horkheimer, amid the wreckage of world war, lost faith in progress; his dialectic negated one construct after another. The liberal order, to begin with, was diseased: “The bourgeois economy was so arranged that individuals maintain the life of society by looking after their own happiness. Inherent in this structure, however, is a dynamic that ultimately accumulates fantastic power on one side and material and spiritual weakness on the other, to a degree that recalls the old Asiatic dynasties.” The bureaucratic coldness of Bolshevik Communism and the violent regressions of Fascism were yet worse. The value-neutral positivism of modern science cast its nerve-rattling accomplishments as something inevitable and irrevocable—a “further extension of nature.”
Adorno internalized and perfected Horkheimer’s implacable voice. One of the youngest members of the original Frankfurt School, he had studied both music and philosophy before turning to the latter in the late twenties. He won lasting notoriety for his diatribes against commercial jazz, though his assessments of the classical-music industry were equally acidulous: “The type of conductor who wallows insatiably in the glories of the Adagio of Bruckner’s Eighth acts like a capitalist magnate, bringing as many organizations, institutes, and orchestras as possible under his control.” Adorno was not yet thirty when Hitler took power. The institute, alert to what was coming, had already moved its financial resources out of the country and opened a subsidiary office in Geneva. By 1934, it was putting down roots in New York.
Disaster glowed ever brighter. Benjamin killed himself at the French-Spanish border in 1940, having despaired of his chances of escaping the Nazis. Horkheimer and Adorno ended up in Los Angeles, where, under the ironic glare of a perpetual sun, they co-wrote “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” the most extreme of Frankfurt School tracts. Their primary target was the sainted Kant, who had defined enlightenment as “the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity,” with maturity consisting of the resolve to act freely and independently. This sounds glorious, and yet, Horkheimer and Adorno observe, freedom falls to those who are best positioned to grab it. They show how the proud autonomy of the bourgeois individual can degenerate into lawless self-aggrandizement—the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche are leading examples—and, eventually, totalitarian megalomania. Herrschaft, or domination, is the principal theme: domination of nature, domination of people, domination of culture.
Adorno assails the last topic in a chapter titled “Culture Industry,” which has few rivals in the annals of élite dyspepsia. “All mass culture under monopoly is identical,” he notes. Consumers have the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” He is arguing with the absent Benjamin, who saw liberatory potential in Charlie Chaplin movies. Until recently, Adorno seemed to have lost the debate. Generations of readers rejected his snobbery, his prejudice, his tendency to write sentences such as “The same babies grin endlessly from magazines, the jazz machine endlessly pounds.” But the underlying ideas sting harder now. Adorno sees mass culture as a pivotal component of the capitalist scheme to mollify the populace with calculated compensations. It claims to be serving the public while inventing needs that the public had been happy to live without. The façade is democratic—Hollywood stars are just like us!—yet the structure is authoritarian, training us to bow down before celebrity gods. The birth of a fascist President out of the spirit of reality television could be seen as a Q.E.D. for Adorno’s thesis.
The question, of course, is what we are supposed to do with these bourgeois jeremiads against bourgeois civilization, beyond enjoying them as high-end primal-scream therapy. Members of the Frankfurt School were prey to what Habermas’s colleague Karl-Otto Apel called the “performative contradiction”: if you have used the tools of reason to dismantle reason, your own work might be compromised in turn. The Marxist theorist Georg Lukács complained that Adorno and company had taken up residence in what he called the Grand Hotel Abyss—“a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity.” Habermas wished, in a sense, to vacate the hotel and traverse the abyss outside.
In sharp contrast to the first-generation members of the Frankfurt School, Habermas came from a petit-bourgeois, culturally conservative Protestant milieu, his family name going back to sixteenth-century Thuringian cobblers. His father, Ernst, led the local chamber of commerce in Gummersbach. The elder Habermas signed up for the Nazi Party in 1933, and Jürgen was required to join the Hitler Youth. Only by chance did he escape being drafted into the Army when teen-agers were forced to defend the Third Reich in its last months.
Cosmopolitan and anti-sentimental, Habermas generally avoided talking about personal matters, but, when he received the Kyoto Prize, in 2004, he delivered a speech that gave glimpses of a strange and difficult youth. He was born with a cleft palate and underwent several operations to address the condition. The experience gave him, he said, a sense of his “dependence and vulnerability.” In school, he had difficulty making himself understood and was mocked for his nasal tone. He was also vulnerable in another sense. Stefan Müller-Doohm, in his 2014 biography of the philosopher, notes that Nazi racial science considered a cleft palate a “sign of degeneration.” A decade later, a number of children born with this condition were murdered by the Nazis as part of their so-called euthanasia program.
As a young man, Habermas threw himself into the rapidly reopening culture of the new West German state. He consumed the modernist canon that had been forbidden during the Nazi period: abstract art, Expressionist and Brechtian theatre, Italian neorealist cinema. Politically, he aligned himself with the left wing of the Social Democratic Party. He studied philosophy in Göttingen, in Zurich, and in Bonn, where he received his doctorate. At first, he revered the arcane thought of Martin Heidegger, who, despite his initial support for the Nazi regime, remained a formidable figure in the postwar era. In 1953, Heidegger republished his 1935 lectures on metaphysics, and Habermas was shocked to find that the bard of Being had not only kept pro-Nazi sentiments in the text—one lecture speaks of the “inner truth and greatness” of Hitler’s Germany—but also refused to admit that anything had been amiss. In an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Habermas asked, “Is it not the noble duty of thoughtful people to clarify the accountable deeds of the past and to keep knowledge of them alive?”—those deeds being the “planned murder of millions of people.”
That brash attack caught the attention of Adorno, who had returned to Germany and was working alongside Horkheimer at the reconstituted Institute for Social Research. Three years later, Habermas took up an invitation to assist Adorno at the institute. Unfortunately, Horkheimer was less enthusiastic about the new recruit. At the height of the Cold War, the institute’s director wished more than ever to avoid any taint of orthodox Marxism, and he got it into his head that Habermas was a revolutionary subversive. In a nine-page letter to Adorno in 1958, Horkheimer grumbled about the “dialectical Herr H.” Adorno, who generally deferred to Horkheimer, stood by his assistant. Still, the atmosphere was uncomfortable enough that Habermas left the institute a year later, to write his Habilitation, or second dissertation, a requirement for qualifying as a professor in German universities.
What resulted was “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Habermas’s first major work, and still his most famous. It is a potent mixture of critical theory and social history, tracing the evolution of public discourse and media culture from the eighteenth century to the present. We follow the inception of a space between private and political life where open debate is possible—that of Öffentlichkeit, which can be translated as “public” or “publicness” but is usually rendered as “public sphere.” The concept was not new: Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 book, “The Human Condition,” had described the development of the “public realm” or “the common.” Yet Habermas’s approach was exceptionally rigorous and precise. He had a flair for folding masses of literature into fluid narratives.
“Structural Transformation” is, essentially, a story of rise and fall. At first, the public sphere was reserved for displays of power by the ruling classes. Then, as the bourgeois classes prospered under capitalism, they began to exercise their own kind of Öffentlichkeit. Periodicals first presented mundane merchant reports, then ventured to publish observations on arts and literature. This shift became a dry run for the discussion of heavier matters: “Critical debate ignited by works of literature and art was soon extended to include economic and political disputes.” Habermas also lavishes attention on coffeehouses, reading clubs, salons, and other in-between places where new ideas were taking shape. Although he is aware of the darker side of the rising bourgeoisie—notably its links to economic exploitation—he insists that the bourgeois mentality was never just ideology: it offered a blueprint for a truly free society.
In the later chapters of “Structural Transformation,” the influence of the Frankfurt School is unmistakable. In the late nineteenth century, the media became increasingly preoccupied by profit. Newspapers fell into the hands of magnates who advanced their own interests. With the entrance of radio and television, information was transmitted instantaneously and universally, yet the public grew passive, absorbing news without necessarily acting on it. As media monopolies gained control of discourse, a new feudalism arose. Habermas is particularly acute in showing what the modern media landscape can do to politics. Candidates must position themselves as entertainers, performing for voters rather than persuading them. Each campaign season is a Neuinszenierung—a new theatrical production. Decades before anyone talked about filter bubbles, Habermas wrote of a “homogeneous opinion climate,” of “fictional consensus.”
“Structural Transformation” had a triumphant reception when it was published, in 1962. Two years later, once Horkheimer retired, Habermas assumed the archtheorist’s post at Goethe University. (Horkheimer, to his credit, had dropped his objections to his younger colleague.) Stepping into the public forum mapped out in “Structural Transformation,” Habermas wrote prolifically for newspapers, often commenting on growing student protests. For the most part, he defended the students, but he recoiled when a few activists raised the possibility of violent action. In 1967, he made an off-the-cuff remark about “left fascism,” which he soon retracted, although he was never able to regain his standing among the radicals.
Chaos engulfed the institute at the end of 1968. Students occupied the building and hung banners with mocking quotations from Horkheimer. In January, 1969, Adorno and his colleague Ludwig von Friedeburg called in the police. Although Habermas did not take part in that decision, as Frankfurt police records indicate, he did publicly defend Adorno’s actions. A few months later, three women staged an infamous Busenattentat, or “breast attack,” baring their chests during an Adorno lecture on the dialectic. One student leaflet read, “Adorno as an institution is dead!” The man himself died, of a heart attack, that summer. Habermas remembered him as “the only genius I have met in my life.”
Habermas would have been Adorno’s natural successor at the institute, but, after the tumult of the student protests, he stepped back from the public fray. In the seventies, he immersed himself in multidisciplinary research projects at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World, in Bavaria. In 1981, he emerged with “Theory of Communicative Action,” a two-volume treatise that attempts to renovate the meetinghouse of reason. This is the moment when Habermas breaks from the Frankfurt School. Adorno’s climactic philosophical work, “Negative Dialectic,” invoked the Shoah as the black hole of the Enlightenment: “After Auschwitz, our feelings reject any claim for the positivity of existence as sanctimony, as injustice to the victims.” Unwilling to renounce positivity, Habermas returns to the old Kantian problem: How, in an age of bewildering change and undeniable catastrophe, can rational individuals build a more humane world?
Kant unveiled a transcendental dimension in which we can hold fast to universal concepts, even if we cannot verify them. His “categorical imperative” was an Enlightenment revision of the Golden Rule: follow only those maxims that you believe could apply to all. Habermas shares Horkheimer and Adorno’s doubts about such a scheme, which puts too much faith in individuals’ ability to divine truth on their own. Instead, reason should grow from the quotidian mechanics of human contact, as we learn by trial and error what it means to be human and humane. In “Theory of Communicative Action,” Habermas lays out a master synthesis of analytic methods, including Marx’s critique of capitalism, Émile Durkheim’s depiction of collective consciousness, Max Weber’s sociology of power, systems theory, speech-act theory, and psychoanalysis. The book is so encyclopedic that it becomes unwieldy, even by the standards of European philosophy. By the same measure, it feels like a faithful mirror of our hyper-complex world.
At the heart of the scheme is American pragmatism, which older schools of German thought had considered unserious. Habermas leans heavily on the Chicago-based social philosopher George Herbert Mead, who declared that the act of communication is essential for the formation of both society and the individual. We find our identity through interaction with others, and we must be prepared for anyone to question our claims, whether on the grounds of truth, sincerity, relevance, or coherence. Merely using the pronoun “you” presumes an exchange of roles and risks rebuttal. Each time we step outside our egoistic frame, we undergo a course of dialectic. This quest for consensus is so significant that it is endowed with a slight mystical tinge: “The very medium of mutual understanding abides in a peculiar half-transcendence.” Later, Habermas called that process “transcendence from within”—a merging of the self with the other.
“Theory of Communicative Action” stirred vigorous debate, in keeping with its theme. Many critics said that its picture of discourse was too becalmed, resembling a university seminar. Habermas makes little allowance for humans’ tendency to shout down one another, for men’s tendency to shout down women, for lies and manipulations, for the twisting of reason into its opposite. In response, Habermas maintained that communication is impossible unless people at least assume that consensus is possible. If you go into every conversation thinking that your counterpart could be a sociopath, you will retreat into paranoid isolation. This is also the fundamental challenge of politics—and, not surprisingly, Habermas turned next to the theory of democracy.
There were always two Habermases: the methodical academic and the nimble public commentator. Peter J. Verovšek, a professor at the University of Groningen, explores that double identity in a new book, “Jürgen Habermas: Public Intellectual and Engaged Critical Theorist.” According to Habermas, philosophers should present themselves not as “teachers of the nation”—the history of intellectuals in Nazi Germany besmirched that role—but as “dilettantes” who “question the demarcation lines between various realms.” His paragon, surprisingly, was Adorno, who, notwithstanding his mandarin prose, often explicated his ideas on radio and television. Habermas preferred to speak through newspaper essays—hundreds of them, on a multitude of topics, from postmodern architecture to genetic engineering. He could be deft, as in his sketch of the mood of the nineties: “somewhat depressed, somewhat clueless, the whole thing washed over by the throb of techno-pop.” There were limits to his hipness, though. Once, he told the writer Peter Handke that he had never heard the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” causing Handke to smack him.
Habermas returned to the limelight in the late seventies, when far-left terrorist actions led the conservative Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauss to accuse the Frankfurt School of having inspired the violence. Habermas wrote in Der Spiegel, “Rest assured, we will not accuse Herr Strauss of being a fascist”—while more or less doing so. In the mid-eighties, Habermas went after conservative historians who felt that Germans should no longer flagellate themselves over the Nazi past. The historian Ernst Nolte relativized the Holocaust by saying that the “so-called annihilation of the Jews” was only one of many twentieth-century horrors, the worst of which came from Bolshevism. Habermas responded angrily in Die Zeit: “Auschwitz shrinks to the level of a technical innovation and becomes explicable in the face of an ‘Asiatic’ threat from an enemy still standing outside our gates.” He propelled this Historikerstreit, or historians’ feud, into the mainstream and succeeded, for a while, in discrediting the apologists.
At the time, the conservative critique of the welfare state was gaining ground across the West, not least in the United States. Habermas’s admiration for the American prototype waned during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan—when deregulation eroded the independence of the media—and plunged during the Presidency of George W. Bush. Visiting New York shortly after September 11th, Habermas was alienated by an upsurge of patriotic blather and xenophobia. In the face of the “callous superpower,” he proposed, the nascent European Union could define itself as a different kind of transnational entity— a federation of peoples that, through hard experience, had moved past the futility of nationalism. In place of tribal notions of folkish identity, the peoples of the world could adopt Verfassungspatriotismus—patriotism for a constitution, for a society’s collective plan. Habermas’s disdain for chauvinist displays was visceral. Whenever the German national anthem was played, he preferred to leave the room.
In “Between Facts and Norms,” published in 1992, Habermas assimilated communicative action to “deliberative democracy”—a term that he had picked up from the American political scientist Joseph M. Bessette. Echoing the political philosophy of John Rawls, Habermas writes that a healthy deliberative democracy must serve multiple nodes of opinion. At the center are the lawmaking and governing institutions. The sheer complexity of large democracies demands such an official apparatus, even if, as Habermas knows, it can become captive to controlling interests. As a counterweight, a periphery of mass opinion—a new version of the public sphere—can force fresh items onto the societal agenda. By way of grassroots organization, civil disobedience, investigative journalism, and the like, it can draw attention to economic inequality, ecological crisis, civil rights, and technological threats. It is a zone of “anarchic, unfettered communicative freedom”—a “warning system with sensors.”
Habermas’s center-and-periphery model gives a persuasive picture of democracy as it currently functions. Is a more inclusive mechanism possible? The political theorist Hélène Landemore has won notice as a champion of direct democracy, which would allow the barriers between center and periphery to give way. In her new book, “Politics without Politicians,” Landemore cites Habermas respectfully but contends that deliberative democracy hardly deserves the name when only a few people are actually deliberating. The great counterexample is ancient Athens, which was steered by a five-hundred-person council whose members were generally chosen by lot. The best analogy to direct democracy in contemporary life is jury duty, which generally seems to go better than anyone expects. How such a system could be replicated in a nation of tens or hundreds of millions is unclear, although Landemore sees encouraging signs in advisory citizen councils that have been convened in Canada, Ireland, Iceland, and France. To be sure, direct democracy is no guarantee of wise decision-making. Athens was a belligerent city-state that fell victim to its own aggressions. The experiment lasted about two hundred and fifty years.
In his last decades, Habermas added one more link to his long chain of disciplines. The rise of fundamentalism, in the form of evangelical Christianity, Islamist revivalism, and Hindu nationalism, prompted him to consider the “unexhausted force of religious traditions,” as he put it in 2007. Although he was an atheist, he opened dialogues with clerical figures, including Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI. Conceding that “enlightened reason unavoidably loses its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole,” Habermas said that philosophers should have an “awareness of what is missing” in their thinking, particularly when it comes to moral norms. Religious institutions, for their part, should make peace with the modern state, which cannot choose among competing world views. More than that, they should actively collaborate with secular thinkers to articulate a code of justice that all participants can respect. Benedict wasn’t receptive to that argument, but Leo XIV seems conscious of it.
Habermas’s religious preoccupations yielded a culminating masterpiece, “Also a History of Philosophy,” a seventeen-hundred-and-fifty-page behemoth that appeared in German in 2019, as the author turned ninety. (Polity Press, which has published much of Habermas’s œuvre in English, released a translation, by Ciaran Cronin, in 2023.) It’s more engrossing than you might expect. Habermas was the kind of professor who knows the literature cold yet never tires of bringing it to life, and “Also a History” is an epic theological-philosophical pageant that stretches across millennia, moving from Neolithic ritual and ancient myth to the monotheistic religions and onward to modern secular thought. Kant retains a place of honor; Heidegger gets a few farewell kicks.
At all stages of history, Habermas shows, humanity has been trying to work out codes for the common good, and these surface even in times of dogmatic repression. Buddha offers an egalitarian path to enlightenment; Confucius codifies a religion of learning; Augustine infuses Christianity with Plato and Aristotle; Martin Luther shifts spirituality inward; Duns Scotus separates belief from knowledge; William of Ockham cultivates equality under the law. Rationality lurks in theology from the beginning, just as philosophy never shakes off its yearning for the metaphysical. Perhaps the most ingenious move in “Also a History” is to draft the intractable Adorno onto the conciliatory team. Theological content, Adorno once said, “will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane.” This is just the sort of translation of the sacred that Habermas traces in his book.
Notably, “Also a History” gives scant attention to Islam. The medieval philosopher al-Farabi, who considered democracy the least imperfect of imperfect governments, is mentioned only in passing. A similar Western bias contributed to one of Habermas’s last, and least effective, public interventions. In November, 2023, after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis and the onset of Israel’s brutal counterstrike on Gaza, Habermas signed a statement that reasserted solidarity between Germany and Israel. After a glancing mention of Palestinian suffering, the authors write, “The standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” It’s one thing to deny that genocide has taken place in Gaza; it’s another to imply more broadly that the topic is out of bounds. At a crucial moment, Habermas’s cherished pluralism failed him.
“If no dread remains, the monsters return,” Habermas wrote early in his career. They’re back, on several continents. Earlier this year, in Germany, the Sachsen-Anhalt branch of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party released a platform containing such demands as “Think German!,” “Promote patriotism—no state money for anti-German art and culture!,” and “Build more beautifully!” This dumbed-down Goebbels gobbledygook revived talking points that Habermas had tried to quash during the Historikerstreit. Not surprisingly, AfD representatives could barely contain their glee over the philosopher’s death. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the Party’s nastier voices, posted a YouTube video in which he said, “Habermas is dangerous. He is one of the greatest enemies of the German nation.” Tillschneider’s inability to put Habermas into the past tense was somehow reassuring.
An equally obnoxious obituary came from the billionaire pen of Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies. Before Karp turned to hawking surveillance systems that have assisted ICE in its murderous roundups of immigrants, he studied philosophy under Habermas in Frankfurt. In an article for Politico, Karp recounted how Habermas provided fierce but fair criticism of his papers: “It was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.” Alas, the losses that Karp has in mind don’t seem to involve learning, rigor, or reason. Waving away Habermas’s cosmopolitan ideals, he says that discourse “must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional—and indeed national and cultural—source.” This is the language of MAGA and the AfD, not to mention Heidegger circa 1935. Karp’s ideological atavism is all too typical of the current bent of Silicon Valley.
Habermas was well aware of how the internet had deformed his beloved public sphere. At first, he thought that the digital arena could amplify all those anarchic voices on the periphery. Sometimes it has: think of social-media-driven movements such as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo. More often, though, the indirectness and the anonymity of digital exchanges have sabotaged understanding. If, as G. H. Mead argued, face-to-face interactions facilitate the formation of a mature personality, the internet has enabled a mass regression to adolescent bullying and narcissism. Furthermore, tech companies designed their platforms to heighten conflict and thereby prolong engagement. It’s as if they had read “Theory of Communicative Action” and done the opposite. Habermas tried to assess the damage in “A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” which appeared in 2022 and turned out to be his last book. At the age of ninety-three, he couldn’t be expected to cover fast-changing terrain, but he got off some crisp shots, writing of a “desolate cacophony in fragmented, self-enclosed echo chambers” and “the libertarian grimace of world-dominating digital corporations.”
When the A.I. chatbots march in, the “colonization of the lifeworld,” to use another ungainly but apt Habermas phrase, enters a terminal stage. Horkheimer and Adorno had concluded that advanced capitalism, far from being a technocratic monolith, had an inherent tendency toward chaos and madness. A.I. is at once a consummation of technological control and a new level of cultish delirium. The designers themselves are often incapable of explaining what their systems are doing. Habermas’s entire world view was premised on the idea of people learning from one another; A.I. annihilates communicative action in the name of hallucinatory conversations with sycophantic machines. The social effects have proved instantly disastrous: rampant disinformation, mass student cheating, cases of users becoming addicted to A.I. or killing themselves with its help. Meanwhile, to the joy of investors, untold thousands of jobs have vanished. As an added coup, A.I. managed to deliver a personal affront to Habermas a year before his death. In 2024, Google DeepMind unveiled a “Habermas Machine,” which has been described as a “scaffolded pair of LLMs designed to find consensus among people who disagree.” The philosopher had not given Google permission to use his name, and he was horrified when he heard about the scheme.
In his final book, Habermas spoke of the need to “institutionalize the anarchic power of saying ‘no.’ ” The force of refusal, of Melville’s “I would prefer not to,” is potentially absolute: slop ceases to exist when we stop clicking on it. Europe, where the Enlightenment first arose and where it met its first demise, is the likeliest place for a concerted rebellion. State funding for media and culture means that the public sphere remains partly intact, and the E.U. has taken steps to regulate the internet and A.I. Moreover, as Habermas saw at the time of the Iraq War, a pan-European sensibility is being bolstered by a cumulative loathing for a long century of American imperialism—military, economic, technological, cultural. Perhaps there could even be a real shudder of self-disgust on these shores—a recognition that our national pursuit of material happiness has immiserated much of the rest of the world and is now devouring itself. Such, at least, is the vibe of our squalid semiquincentennial summer.
Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress. This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope. ♦