Jürgen Habermas: a philosopher whose hopes for a better future are more important than ever

It is impossible to capture seven decades of formidable intellect, wrapped into some 14,000 books and articles, in less than a thousand words. Yet German philosopher Jürgen Habermas staked his career on the power of dialogue and deliberation, so it is worth chiming in.

Habermas, who died on March 14 at the age of 96, was among the greatest thinkers of our time. He was unshakeable in his conviction that people have minds of their own, can hope for a better future, and have the capability, collectively and democratically, to bring that future to life.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1929, he escaped conscription to the Wehrmacht by a whisker. His later realisation that, as a child, he had been enveloped by “a politically criminal system” propelled him into a lifelong scholarly, political and personal campaign to rescue democracy and restore the future.

It was an uphill struggle of breathtaking proportions. If the best was still to come, the journey towards enlightenment would require “nothing less than a comprehensive theory of modern society and its underlying dynamics”.

That was the scholarly project, and few 20th century theorists could tackle it. Habermas led the way with sweeping interdisciplinary reach: historical understanding, geographical imagination, sociological insight, grasp of legal theory, sustained engagement with ethics, aesthetics, psychology, epistemology, theology and more. Any one of these approaches would have moved the dial, but in Habermas they came together with a powerful political message.

Variously described as a socialist, democrat, internationalist, and above all humanitarian, his philosophy – practical, perhaps pragmatic – was his politics. Its centrepiece was the formation, functioning and fragility of a public sphere – Öffentlichkeit – mediating between states and civil societies, promising an alternative to the authoritarian, totalitarian regimes he eschewed.

Bookended by two landmark works, Habermas’s lifelong conviction was that the formation of public opinion through rational, reasoned conversation was vital for the conduct and survival of parliamentary democracy. Both works are cautionary tales concerned equally with the forces stifling deliberative democracy and with the conditions in which it might flourish.

The first, the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) finds the scope for informed, inclusive, critical debate compromised by the intrusion of calculative, commercial and bureaucratic interests. Six decades later, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (2022) takes on the algorithms driving social media. These, he argued – by accident, design or vested interests – fragment the public sphere, undermining the possibility for collective action against environmental change, excessive inequality and more.

Meanwhile, anchored on the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas mounted a sustained effort to make the public sphere work.

What scholar in the humanities and social sciences in the last half century is untouched by this project? My own reckoning, for example, was his prequel on Knowledge and Human Interests (1968). Once you realise that knowledge is not a thing to be discovered but a practice constituted by competing interests, there is no going back.

We were all critical theorists then, on a self-reflective pilgrimage to more rational, fairer futures. Habermas stayed with us every step of the way, not least because he did not confine himself to scholarly books and articles. His journalistic output and other public interventions were equally prodigious. Consider, for example, some 12 volumes of talks, speeches and commentary gathered in his Kleine Politische Schriften.

There is, it must be said, a well-developed feminist critique – and re-visioning – of Habermas’ core ideas. Those very public spaces in which deliberative democracy thrives (if it does) have traditionally been occupied by men, and are generally exclusionary in other ways. Not that such challenges fazed Habermas, who regularly exchanged views with a wide range of public intellectuals. These debates were how he expected the future to unfold.

Hope for the future

For Habermas, hope has not always triumphed over experience. Early in his career he underestimated how tame “conversation” might seem to his students. In the middle years, he probably oversold the potential of intellectuals to steer public debate.

More recently, a trend towards democratic decline and strengthening authoritarianism might suggest that he fell into a classic “democracy trap”. Was it futile to hope that the mandate for fully enfranchised populations to choose their governments through regular free and fair elections would spread?

Habermas was, in fact, acutely aware that the capacity for deliberative democracy can never be taken for granted. However, he never gave up on its promise. On this, he wrote actively to the end, sometimes controversially.

Not everyone liked his style: one obituary describes him as “brilliant, influential and stupefyingly tedious”. But the more telling view is that his work “has given us a vocabulary in which the promises of dignity, autonomy, and emancipation are kept alive and true”.

All in all, Habermas’ achievements are a valorisation of everything that populism is not. He held fast to his conviction that deep knowledge and cogent arguments can win the day, that even the smallest gesture towards a better world is worth the effort.

That is why a recent reviewer could describe his final three-volume project – Also a History of Philosophy – as “a work of willed optimism”. And it is why, in his last work, a collection of biographical conversations – Things Needed to Get Better – Habermas still pins his hopes on critical dialogue and reasoned debate.

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Susan Smith has received funding from the ESRC, ARC and AHURI. She is affiliated with the British Academy and the University of Cambridge.