Jürgen Habermas died on March 14, 2026, only three months before his ninety-seventh birthday. For his memorial on June 19, mourners gathered in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, the fabled site of Germany’s nineteenth-century attempt at liberal revolution. It was an elegant affair. Before the speaker’s podium stood a vase filled with white roses; to the right, a large photograph of the deceased. Though Habermas was recognizable by his white hair and glasses, the camera had captured him in an atypical pose with raised eyebrows and open mouth, as if he were astonished at all the fuss. Along with family members and colleagues from Europe and abroad, there appeared a retinue of distinguished officials, including the mayor of Frankfurt; the president of the city’s university; the director of Suhrkamp, the publishing house to which Habermas had entrusted nearly all his mature works; and the president of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Cristina Lafont, a Spanish philosopher and a former student of Habermas’s, gave a loving tribute. Adding to the solemnity of the occasion was a string quartet that played two slow movements from Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. Even the music was charged with symbolism: Berg had taught composition to Theodor W. Adorno, the philosopher and cultural critic with whom Habermas later worked at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.

One may be forgiven for finding all this ritual inappropriate, as it could leave the impression that Habermas held a sacred office among popes and kings, while in truth he was a ruthless critic of all sacred authority. His death was not unexpected. In his last few years he had grown noticeably frail. His wife of seventy years, Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft, had died in 2025, as had his daughter Rebekka in 2023. In one of my last exchanges with him, when he had just returned from Rebekka’s funeral, his typically restrained manner was pierced by grief. I did not know him well, but even our slender bond left me with the impression of a man whose intellect was matched by an astonishing modesty. In person he lacked nearly all traces of what is commonly called charisma. In lectures and seminars, his cleft palate caused his voice to be muted and his pronunciation at times unclear. It is a poignant irony that despite this disability he assigned the greatest importance to mutual understanding in language, and in addition to writing formidable studies in social theory and philosophy, he became the foremost public intellectual in Germany if not in all of Europe.

Over the course of his life Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument. By the time of his death, however, many felt that this principle had grown obsolete. In Germany and elsewhere the official obituaries were fulsome in their praise, but one could hardly ignore the widespread opinion among journalists and critics that he had outlived his time. Some condemned his entire life’s work, vilifying him for his alleged Eurocentrism or liberalism, as if these were the worst crimes imaginable at a moment when the European Union was threatened by Russian aggression and political parties fueled by xenophobia and hostility to democracy were on the ascent everywhere. Others nursed old complaints, expressing disdain for a philosopher who, they said, busied himself with “ideal theory” while ignoring the harsh realities of money and power. Habermas, they said, placed undue trust in the values of the Enlightenment and the promises of the “public sphere,” a realm where reasonable debate serves as the training ground for democratic self-government. But he defended that ideal even as the actual public sphere grew bellicose and coarse.

Philosophy, of course, thrives on contestation: it is a practice that runs through its history at least since Socrates entered the Athenian agora. I first came to know Habermas because he learned of a lecture in which I had faulted him for what seemed to me a worrisome self-contradiction. He wrote to me, expressing apologies for the disturbance, and requested a copy. Upon reading what I had written he was initially piqued, but a day later he wrote again to admit that I had a point. In the months and years that followed, our exchanges often grew vigorous but were always respectful, confirming his reputation as an intellectual who was always ready to revise his opinions. Philosophers, he believed, are not sages but co-citizens in a conversation from which no one can be recused. He condensed this idea into a well-known formula: “In a process of enlightenment there can only be participants.”

To appreciate his legacy, The Philosopher: Habermas and Us by the German cultural historian Philipp Felsch may be a good place to start. It is written in an accessible style and avoids technical themes that would be of interest only to philosophers. Felsch is an engaging storyteller who packs small anecdotes with big ideas. In a previous book, The Summer of Theory (2015), he explored the history of Merve Verlag, an upstart press that introduced a young generation of German readers to the more rebellious streams of French poststructuralism in the 1960s and 1970s. Habermas, however, had none of the glamour that once drew generations of graduate students to French theory. Those who came to appreciate him were inspired not by his persona but by the sobriety of his claims. A culture enchanted by tweets and memes is ill-equipped for the slow grind of rational argument that made Habermas such a formidable theorist of modern society.

This, more than anything, may explain the air of melancholy that now looms over his memory. Already in 1962 he warned that the ideal of the public sphere might be eclipsed by the distorting forces of mass media and money. The warning proved clairvoyant. Liberal democracies across the globe have been stripped of their illusion of inevitability, and their failures have left them vulnerable to authoritarian reaction. Habermas once referred to modernity as “an unfinished project.” Today his work reads like a promissory note for a rational and egalitarian society that never came to fruition. His final interview, conducted with Stefan Müller-Doohm and Roman Yos, was published with the regretful title Es musste etwas besser werden, now translated as Things Needed to Get Better.

Born in 1929, Habermas belonged to the generation of West Germans who grew up with what Chancellor Helmut Kohl called “the grace of late birth.” Too young to have been compromised personally by Nazism, they were old enough to feel a special burden of responsibility for combating forces of regression in the Federal Republic. His father had sympathized with the Nazis, a fact that only emboldened Habermas in his growing conviction that Germans must commit to the collective task of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “working through the past.” By the age of twenty he had enrolled at the University of Göttingen, where he was at first drawn to the then-fashionable Heideggerian philosophy. His essays from the early 1950s have, in Felsch’s words, “an unmistakable Heidegger vibe.” In 1953, however, came a shift. Heidegger had republished An Introduction to Metaphysics, the 1935 lectures in which he had praised “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism, a phrase that he did not excise from the postwar edition. Incensed, the young Habermas responded with a newspaper essay in which he declared that it was time “to think with Heidegger against Heidegger.” Philosophers, he wrote, are not exempt from public criticism; those who enter political life must be held to shared standards of rational scrutiny.

The essay marked a turning point in his career. As Peter Verovšek relates in his thoughtful study Jürgen Habermas: Public Intellectual and Engaged Critical Theorist, Habermas was only twenty-four when he emerged as a public intellectual, and from then on he performed a balancing act between densely composed works of social philosophy and more accessible, often acerbic interventions in the public sphere. Within a few years his writing drew the attention of Adorno, who had recently returned from exile with his colleague Max Horkheimer to refound the Institute for Social Research—the Frankfurt School. In Adorno and his colleagues, Habermas discovered the still-living representatives of a left-intellectual tradition the Nazis had tried to destroy. Later in life Habermas said of Adorno that he was “the only genius I have ever met.” In Frankfurt he served as Adorno’s assistant and learned to take seriously the animating principle of critical theory: that the social contradictions of suffering and exclusion are an offense to reason itself.

Despite its transformation since its founding more than a century ago, Frankfurt School critical theory has retained its emphasis on rationality. Horkheimer once observed that critical theory seeks to honor “the materialist content in the idealist concept of reason.” By materialism he meant Marxism, but critical theory became a labile Marxism untethered from orthodoxy and made fluid in an endless play of dialectics. For Habermas, however, Marxism lost its privileged position and became only one theoretical resource among many. He traveled a path alongside European social democracy, which in the postwar era shifted from revolution to reform, and in his mature years as a public intellectual he was seldom out of sync with the socialist mainstream. By the later 1970s it was clear that he could no longer be considered a Marxist, if he had ever been one at all. Felsch quotes a telling remark from 1988: “Socialism will survive only if it takes seriously the utopian element that lies within democratic procedures themselves.”

But what kind of utopia did he mean? The rise of liberal-democratic ideals in the eighteenth century posed an urgent question that remains a preoccupation for political philosophy today. Given that human beings are fallible and easily led astray by their passion for money and prestige, what assurance do we have that the popular will can guide us along the proper path? And if the mere mechanism of popular suffrage can bring demagogues to power, why should we not prefer the traditional decisions of theocrats and kings?

Habermas proposed that we examine our concept of democratic procedure: we must explain why the consensus that emerges from discussion has any legitimacy. The key, he argued, lies in communication itself. Rationality for Habermas is not an independent or metaphysical force that directs us from above; it is the ongoing work of making ourselves understood. Rationality is a social practice: a web that we weave with one another and that binds us to a fragile consensus fashioned from argument alone. Power, of course, is an inevitable feature of social life. But if we wish to explain why one arrangement would be preferable to another, we must distinguish between power that is justified and power that is secured by force alone. Groups may adhere to a common belief because it is buttressed by mere authority. A legitimate consensus, however, is one based on reasons.

Habermas worked out the philosophical and sociological details for this idea in his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Felsch does not exaggerate when he says its two volumes “tower before the reader like a craggy mountain range”: it stretches over a thousand pages and draws on sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. But its claims deserve serious consideration. Habermas fastens our attention on what the sociologist Melvin Pollner once called “mundane reason,” the shared practice of seeking to make ourselves understood in everyday communication. This practice is not confined to the rarefied space of a university seminar (as some critics claimed); the goal of rational understanding is something we presuppose whenever we give reasons to one another. When I tell you that I would prefer to avoid crossing a picket line, you can rightly expect me to back up my preference with reasons. We might debate the efficacy of strikes or harms to local business, and neither of us may succeed in convincing the other. But the possibility that we might reach agreement is what first draws us into communication. We violate this possibility when we resort to coercion or use language strategically, manipulating others rather than seeking to convince them with good arguments.

In developing his theory of communicative rationality, Habermas demonstrated a rare gift for learning from others. Unlike his more provincial German contemporaries, he freely borrowed from Anglo-American thinkers such as J.L. Austin and John Searle, who pioneered the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, and he also embraced pragmatists like George Herbert Mead, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. Why communicative rationality should matter beyond philosophy can be difficult to explain, and Habermas often encountered resistance from critics who dismissed it as “ideal theory” that never touches down in reality.

But this criticism rests on a misunderstanding. Habermas never claimed that we are likely to reach a noncoercive agreement. His point was only that without assuming the possibility of rational consensus we would not engage in giving reasons at all. In debates with self-described realists Habermas made matters harder for himself by invoking the prospect of an “ideal speech situation.” He later regretted the phrase; realists seized on it to dismiss his rationalism as an otherworldly fantasy. But it is the realists who are caught in a double bind. In Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus gave voice to the realist principle that justice is merely the right of the stronger. Yet if that’s all realism amounts to, realists have no reasons for objecting when the strong prevail. One can object to coercion only if one believes that noncoercive agreement remains a possibility.

In deference to reality, Habermas embedded his theory of rational communication within a historical and sociological frame. His study offers a map of a modern society in which communicative and strategic rationality are parceled out into two domains, the “lifeworld” and the “system.” The lifeworld—the term comes from the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl—is the realm of meaning, culture, and belief. We inhabit it insofar as we create a meaningful environment for ourselves and with others. In a traditional lifeworld, meanings are fixed as sacred and unquestionable. But in a modern lifeworld we gradually loosen the hardened ground of conventional meaning—in Habermas’s phrase, the sacred is “linguistified”—until everything becomes available for rational scrutiny. For Habermas this transformation marks a salutary advance: through communication with others our lifeworld gains what he calls “a singular transparence.”

That is the ideal. But Habermas knew that modern society’s complexity demands a bureaucratic apparatus supporting our practices of communication. Borrowing from Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons, he conceived of the “system” as the sphere of purely “instrumental,” or means-end, rationality. Economic transactions, for example, are shunted off from the meaning-rich realm of the lifeworld to the system, where policies and values, once decided, are put into play. For Habermas idealism must be staged within realistic parameters. Critics to his left, however, argued that the lifeworld-system distinction already conceded too much: it allowed a capitalist economy to proceed as long as it honored directives handed down through democratic debate. It was an idealized image, to be sure, but it bore some resemblance to the perfected vision of the postwar European social welfare state.

Habermas recognized that this is hardly the way society works. The map serves not as a reliable picture of actual conditions but as a standard by which to judge what has gone wrong. The system no longer supports the lifeworld; it has metastasized into an uncontrollable force with its own imperatives. The lifeworld has grown feeble, and democratic deliberation has lost its authority. Instead of issuing directives to the system, the lifeworld is now “colonized” by it. The result is a pathological condition—a modern society unresponsive to human purposes—that earlier Marxists such as Georg Lukács had called “reification.” To describe this scenario Habermas used a startling metaphor: systemic imperatives make an incursion into the lifeworld “like colonial masters coming into a tribal society.”

The publication of The Theory of Communicative Action confirmed Habermas’s place among the most consequential social theorists of his day. Even at the time, however, some felt that its claims had already grown antiquated. Felsch writes that our lingering faith in “the transformative power of theory” has assumed “the Technicolor tones of a retro-futurism in which a weak messianic power seems to slumber on.” It’s a clever phrase but too dismissive by half. Arguments are not fashions that go out of style. Although confidence in rational argument seems in decline, a philosopher’s claims do not lose their validity because a historian consigns them to the past. Habermas was seldom fashionable, and his prose was often difficult, as if each word carried the burden of responsibility for the modern world. In the interview with Müller-Doohm and Yos he urged intellectuals to resist “the obscene tendency to revel in a quietist know-all cynicism.”

In the 1980s Habermas struck back against the cynics in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), a series of critical chapters on the most prominent philosophers since Nietzsche. Insightful but at times impatient, he showed little deference even toward his teachers in Frankfurt: he faulted Adorno and Horkheimer for their grim reflections on reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the coauthored work that he called “their blackest book.” They were guilty, Habermas claimed, of “performative contradiction,” since even as they seemed to condemn reason their own efforts testified to an enduring trust in rational argument.

No less contentious were the chapters on French poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. It has often been said that “French theory” was an American invention, a marketing niche that blurred the differences among Francophone intellectuals whose work had little in common. But Habermas recognized their shared debts to Nietzsche and Heidegger and accused them of reawakening the irrationalist ghosts of the earlier twentieth century. The disputes were never personal; Habermas and Foucault had even agreed to convene a conference in Paris to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Still, his book had the unfortunate effect of opening a generational rift in European philosophy that has never healed.

Many readers, especially those who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, could not forgive Habermas for his assault on French theory. During the same period, however, he also lashed out at Germans he accused of neoconservative backsliding. In the Historikerstreit, or “Historians’ Debate,” of the later 1980s, he assumed the role of moral conscience for the nation, criticizing historians such as Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber for relativizing the crimes of the Nazi past. It was Nolte most of all who aroused his fury in 1986 by insinuating that the murder of European Jews had not been unique but merely a preemptive response to Soviet crimes.

For Habermas such claims were a sign of political regression. In a searing essay in the liberal weekly Die Zeit, he attacked historians who sought to normalize German national identity by shrugging off responsibility for past horrors. The only patriotism that could retain its legitimacy was a “constitutional patriotism,” animated not by nationalist pride but by allegiance to the procedures of democracy itself. Paradoxically, it was Auschwitz that had awakened the once-provincial land to those universal principles. Some historians, even on the left, felt that Habermas had overstepped his bounds by injecting political criteria into a dispute among historians. But Germans have seldom seen their past with dispassionate eyes, and even today the Nazi past serves as terrain for working through present conflict.

In more recent works such as Between Facts and Norms (1992), Habermas confirmed his commitment to democracy. According to his “discourse theory” of political decision and law, a democratic order finds its validity in the inclusive process of rational deliberation. All statutes must meet with the assent of citizens in what he called “a discursive process of legislation.” Such claims showed how much Habermas had joined the mainstream of liberal political thought, even while his commitment to European social democracy placed him well to the left of American colleagues such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Like Rawls, however, he insisted that under conditions of cultural pluralism, traditional forms of solidarity secured by religion or national identity could no longer be valid. All that we should expect from a diverse citizenry is a shared commitment to liberal-democratic procedure. For some this proceduralist liberalism was either too strong or too weak, and during the last two decades of his life he was often criticized from both flanks. His statements as a public intellectual also aroused dissension. Though he never denied his sympathy with Ukraine in its struggles against Russian aggression, he warned of a “highly emotionalized” response and urged the EU to endorse a territorial compromise that would bring the war to an end. It was an argument for realism that few wished to hear.

Still more controversial was a statement Habermas coauthored about Israel and Gaza. On the weekend of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Harvard was hosting an international conference to mark the centenary of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research. Founded in 1923, the institute had developed its ideas just as fascism was clawing its way to power; members of the first generation described their work as a Flaschenpost, or “message in a bottle,” a desperate image that portrayed critical theory as a note cast into the waves with scant confidence that it would ever be received. And yet it survived. It is a sign of the vitality of critical theory today that few guests at Harvard’s conference would have called themselves “Habermasians,” even if they honored his achievements. All remained firmly on the left, but they spoke about the need for critical theory to strike out in new directions. That morning, rumors of the disaster unfolding in Israel circulated among the participants, though none of us yet knew the details. Very soon, however, everyone did.

Over the weeks that followed, Israel prosecuted an intense assault on Gaza, and the mood in Germany was volatile. Human Rights Watch reported an upsurge of violence in Europe against both Muslims and Jews. A synagogue in Berlin was the target of attempted arson. President Steinmeier insisted that there must be no “general suspicion against Muslims” but also stated, controversially, that Germans of Arab or Palestinian descent should “make a clear stand against terror.”

In mid-November 2023 an institute at the Goethe University Frankfurt called Normative Orders, codirected by the political philosophers Rainer Forst and Nicole Deitelhoff, hosted a conference on Islamophobia. Conceived by Saba-Nur Cheema, a political scientist whose parents were refugees from Pakistan and who worked on tolerance, the conference addressed violence and intolerance directed against Muslims in Germany. Cheema had coauthored a government report on Islamophobia just after a right-wing extremist killed ten people, most of them of Turkish descent, in a February 2020 shooting spree in Hanau, a town about fifteen miles from Frankfurt. Forst, a political philosopher and student of Habermas, is highly esteemed for major works on tolerance.

Habermas was soon drawn into the maelstrom of debate. On the same day as the Islamophobia conference, the Normative Orders website posted a statement titled “Principles of Solidarity.” It urged Israel to exercise restraint, called for “the prevention of civilian casualties,” and invoked the classical principle, echoing Augustine and Kant, that a just war can only be waged “with the prospect of future peace.” It affirmed that “elementary rights to freedom and physical integrity as well as to protection from racist defamation are indivisible and apply equally to all.” It also affirmed Germany’s solidarity with Israel: “Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist are central elements worthy of special protection in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi era.” The statement wisely avoided the awkward term Staatsräson, or reason of state, which government officials habitually use when justifying Germany’s military support for Israel. But one sentence stood out. While acknowledging concern for Palestinians, the statement warned that “standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israeli action.” This line might not have provoked international protest but for the fact that Habermas was one of the four signatories.

In mid-November 2023 few reputable international organizations had yet alleged that Israel was committing genocide. Although the word could be heard in popular protests in Germany and elsewhere, the first official accusation of genocide came on December 29, when South Africa filed a claim with the International Court of Justice. For obvious reasons, the term carries an explosive charge, especially in Germany, where many are reluctant to accuse Israel of a crime that weighs on their own conscience. In retrospect, however, ascribing genocidal intent to Israel appears plausible. After the Hamas attack, Israel’s then minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, declared that Israel was at war with “human animals” and ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza and a blockade of electricity, fuel, and food—a clear violation of international law. Since then tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed. In July 2025 the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem called the military campaign “our genocide.”

Because the Normative Orders statement was cosigned, Habermas must share responsibility for words he endorsed. It is worth noting, however, that he had formed his impressions of Israel at an earlier point in its history, when the spirit of Labor Zionism still enjoyed some sympathy even on the political left. He had first visited Israel in 1977 to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish mysticism and an advocate of peace and binationalism. In his conversation with Müller-Doohm and Yos, Habermas described Israel as “beautiful” but “profoundly endangered.” Throughout his career he tried to honor Adorno’s watchword that one must arrange one’s thoughts and deeds so that nothing like Auschwitz ever happens again. In those early weeks of Israel’s war on Gaza, when some Jews in Germany feared for their safety, these words were revived. But if “never again” is not to degenerate into an empty slogan it must mean never again for anyone—including Palestinians.

In the last two years of his life, some hoped that Habermas and his colleagues might update their statement. This did not happen. Critics who never much admired his ideas in the first place seized the opportunity to dismiss him altogether. Others claimed that the statement had been misread: it explicitly expresses concern for Palestinians and nowhere suggests that Israel can exempt itself from international law, and although it warns against the rush to a judgment of genocide, it does not reject the possibility that such a judgment could later become warranted. But the harshest voices declared, in a rush to judgment, that the philosopher’s ideas had been rendered invalid. One of the more thoughtful remarks came from Asef Bayat, an Iranian-born professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, who wrote an open letter to Habermas in December 2023 urging him to honor his own principles of rational dialogue. It would be tragic, Bayat observed, if “the righting of a colossal wrong committed in the past should be tied to perpetuating another monstrous wrong in the present.”

The great misfortune of this affair is that Habermas’s philosemitism may have inhibited him from seeing what Israel has become. We may find it ironic that he first entered the public sphere as a critic of Heidegger but in his declining years found it painful to reckon with the possibility that another genocide might be on the horizon. Yet we are permitted to ask whether a philosopher’s entire legacy can be dismissed because his conscience was fixed on one of the most horrendous crimes in modern history. Universalism by its nature remains forever vulnerable to the charge that it has failed its own ideal, but to impugn the ideal would be to annul the only standard by which lapses can be known. It is to his credit that Habermas never claimed the delphic style of a grand philosopher who dispenses incorrigible and timeless truth. As a citizen and public intellectual, he insisted that philosophy become “postmetaphysical thinking,” a phrase that conveyed his belief that philosophers must allow for fallibilism and learn as they go.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of Habermas’s own learning process is that in his last decades he turned to the topic of religion. Not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11, he received the peace prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, and in his acceptance speech he spoke about the urgent need for dialogue between faith and knowledge. Orthodoxies, he declared, exist in every religion, not only in the Middle East but also in the West, and if we wish to avoid a “clash of civilizations,” we must forgo cultural arrogance and adapt ourselves to the “fact of pluralism” in our own societies. Invoking the language of his Frankfurt School teachers, he insisted that we embrace secularization as an open-ended dialectic that may never come to an end. Religious citizens must therefore be welcomed alongside secularists in democratic practices of deliberation.

With this idea as his inspiration, he plunged into his final work, a monumental two-volume study of the dialogue between philosophy and theology, published in 2019 as Also a History of Philosophy. The title is an allusion to Johann Gottfried Herder, the Enlightenment-era philosopher often credited with linking historical progress to cultural diversity. For a German audience adjusting, after years of immigration, to its status as a multicultural society, his words could be heard as an admonishment and a call for inclusion. In his last years he remained, as always, alert to political reaction. When the United States began its assault on Iraq in 2003, no one could be surprised that Habermas joined Derrida to coauthor a statement of condemnation.

Now that Habermas is gone, the task of understanding his legacy will be left to readers who are willing to forgo polemic and are still capable of reading with care. A realist despite his ideals, Habermas knew that counting on the unforced force of the better argument was an unlikely wager, since it demands exposing oneself to reasonable criticism. Today, however, reasonableness itself may be going extinct. In our combative and digitalized environment, it seems as endangered as the polar bears that find themselves adrift on ice floes in warming seas. Habermas once referred to his teachers Adorno and Horkheimer as practicing a “strategy of hibernation.” But one might now say the same of Habermas himself. For a younger generation of readers, he looks increasingly like a distant memory or an emblem of his time. But his insights cannot be so blithely dismissed. To honor his ideals will require more than memorials; it will require that we create the conditions of equality and inclusion in which reason still has a chance.