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In his later years, Jürgen Habermas was sometimes described as “the last European” – a reference to his passionate commitment to the ideals of the European Union (although not always its modern reality). The great German philosopher was also the last surviving exemplar of a generation of postwar intellectuals formed by the experience of the second world war. Like Jean-Paul Sartre in France, Habermas was as at home in the public square as the seminar room, debating the future of a continent that needed to be rebuilt ethically as well as physically.
In the new age of unreason, where brute exercise of power is explicitly prized above the force of moral argument, the loss of any such figure is to be mourned. But Habermas’s death at the age of 96, as the US and Israel wage an illegal war of choice, and the far right is in the ascendant in France and Germany, feels particularly poignant. A member of the Hitler Youth as a boy, Habermas then made it his life’s work to philosophically ground the democratic values which are now under threat again.
A renewed focus on the great insight that drove his thinking would be an appropriate legacy. The Theory of Communicative Action, his 1980s magnum opus, was not (to put it mildly) as accessible as some of his newspaper opinion pieces. But its central idea – that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are – remains an antidote both to intellectual relativism and Trumpian “realism”, which elevates national or individual self-interest above all other sources of human motivation.
Habermas’s related concept of the public sphere, where rational debate can take place and disagreements be brokered, implied pluralism, civility and inclusion. It envisions a world where no one possesses a monopoly on truth. As was the case with John Rawls (another philosopher whose quest for universal values was driven by the memory of 20th-century totalitarianism), he was justifiably criticised by the left for underplaying structural power dynamics such as class, race and gender. But the dream of a space free from bullying by the state, and corruption by the values of the market, speaks urgently and directly to our present situation.
In recent decades it allowed Habermas to develop what amounted to a nascent politics of the human, diagnosing the dangers inherent in algorithmic social media’s distortion of communication and big tech’s hubris. It also made him an acute and prescient observer of the rise of 21st-century demagoguery, although the weight of German history arguably prevented him from seeing the horrors inflicted by Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza with a clear eye.
One of the most generous tributes to a thinker who embodied the values of the Enlightenment has come from the Vatican, recalling the famous debate between Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), which took place in 2004. Practising what he preached, the rationalist philosopher found common ground with the Catholic theologian. Both men agreed that the Christian vision of human beings as made “in the image and likeness of God” was mirrored in the secular principle that all should be considered of equal worth and treated accordingly. This, said Habermas, was an example of “saving translation”. In illiberal times, it also reads like a necessary philosophical line in the sand.
