The death of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas made world headlines. An appropriate end for a man whose impact on modern western thought was equalled only by his lifelong love of knocking about ideas in the public sphere – an idea he helped define as modern democracy’s survival camp.
When Habermas visited Dublin in 2010 to receive the Ulysses Medal, he outed himself in The Irish Times as a fan of the James Joyce novel, a book he called “highly self-reflective, aesthetically uncompromising ... whose allusions are almost indecipherable”.
Many could say the same of Habermas, whose writings and interests over six decades ran the gamut from electrifying to maddening to impenetrable: here a 1,000-page philosophical tract, there a snappy essay on the joys of driving.
But while Joyce died too young for the modernist movement he sparked, Habermas lived almost too long: witnessing a return of the fascist ghosts he once helped exorcise – in particular authoritarian German theorist Carl Schmitt, whose “state of exception” doctrine provided a blueprint for the Nazis and is now embraced openly by Trump aides.
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For Habermas, whose favourite word was “normative”, the new political norms at the end of his 96 years had worrying echoes of his early life.
Like many of his German generation – from Helmut Kohl to Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI – Habermas was young enough to carry no culpability for the Nazi era yet old enough to carry lifelong scars.
Like Kohl the European integration project – as a pacifist insurance policy – remained Habermas’s major passion from the 1980s on. But getting to this point was, for Habermas, one battle after another.
The son of a “passive [Nazi] sympathiser” father, Habermas attracted his first headlines in 1953 with an act of academic patricide: attacking philosopher king Martin Heidegger, whom he once idolised, as a closet Nazi who still embraced “the inner truth and greatness” of Hitler fascism.
The Habermas essay Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger reads today like an broader attack on the postwar Adenauer-era German amnesia, and a suffocating 1950s consensus that left leading Nazis in public life.
A healthy democracy, Habermas argued from the mid-1960s on, thrives on informed public discourse and respectful dissent.
As a professor at the famed Frankfurt School, he merged philosophy with psychoanalysis and sociology. Habermas’s ideas and language became building blocks of modern German life, starting with the idea of “constitutional patriotism” as the postwar answer to his country’s disastrous embrace of nationalism.
A more universal Habermas theory is of “emancipatory cognitive interest”, exploring the human desire for autonomy and liberation from domination by reflecting on the limits to freedom.
Among his many battles, Habermas fought alongside his 1968-era students against German nuclear rearmament, only to lash out at the student movement’s more violent rhetoric and actors.
In 1986 he helped lead a successful campaign against conservative historians’ efforts to relativise Nazi era crimes. That, in turn, helped open a previously locked emotional door in the German psyche to broad interrogation of its fascist past.
Around the same time, Habermas railed against a “revival of a neoliberalism unhampered by considerations of social justice” and warned of a rise in “economic disparities between the north and the south” that risked a wider “ecological imbalance”.
[ An Irish historian’s new theory of Nazism. ‘The idea makes people nervous’Opens in new window ]
In 2010 he attacked Angela Merkel’s bailout politics as the work of a new political generation in Berlin that “seems to enjoy Germany’s return of Germany to normality as a nation-state – that just wants be ‘like the others’.”
In more recent years his views on Russia and Gaza saw growing criticism. Even polite admirers suggested Habermas thrived in a polite postwar era that was the historical exception rather than the rule of chaotic discourse in what today are called social media bubbles.
“The idea that a democratic convergence of interests and arguments might lead to genuine social progress seems pretty far-fetched,” argued Martin Woessner, professor of history and society at City College New York. In a 2019 essay, he recalled a historian colleague “dismissing it all with just one maybe not so rhetorical question: ‘Has Habermas ever been inside an Irish pub?’”
Yes, says Boston-based Irish philosopher Richard Kearney. He remembers a long evening in an Irish pub in Rome with the “indefatigable, extremely amicable” German philosopher, “who was well able to put back a single malt whiskey at 1am”.
Kearney says Habermas, though a lifelong leftist in the humanist Marxist tradition, could argue for both the European Enlightenment and the crucial, ongoing contribution of its Judeo-Christian heritage.
But even Kearney detected a strain creeping into the German philosopher’s optimism in his final years – as successive postwar norms, institutions, rules and protections came under attack, or were fatally undermined.
By his end, Kearney suggests Habermas was a “disillusioned idealist”, whose love of Joyce and Jameson may have had a Samuel Beckett streak, too.
“Like Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable, Habermas would say: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’,” said Kearney. “Habermas never gave up or gave into cynicism or pessimism. You can call that naive, I call it bold.”
