The funeral cortège for Jürgen Habermas was carried out, appropriately enough, in what still passes for the German public sphere – the national newspapers where he first made his name, more than 70 years ago. One article after another in the long convoy declared it was the end of an era, that it was incumbent upon every rational person to take up the banner of the ‘unfinished project’ of modernity, and that the faithful carry on the ‘learning process’ of humanity. ‘He was a tireless source of far-reaching political norms’, Charles Taylor declared. ‘His thinking was political right down to the most abstract questions’, Rahel Jaeggi wrote. Habermas’s prose, Gustav Seibt assured readers in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, could be ‘brilliant, even snappy’. Eva Illouz thanked Habermas for protecting Europe against Foucault. The Chancellor of the Federal Republic, Friedrich Merz, affirmed that Habermas ‘was one of the most important thinkers of our time’, and that ‘his analytical rigor shaped democratic discourse in Germany’. Perhaps the only dissonant note was sounded in Die Zeit by the Chinese philosopher Tsuo-Yu Cheng, who noted that Habermas had been the rage in China in the 1980s, but was no longer really read there. This stately procession was in marked contrast to the bruitings of the Anglo left, for whom Habermas seemed to figure as a presence hazily remembered from college syllabuses, and anyway wasn’t he in the Hitler Youth and off his rocker about Gaza?

Born in 1929, in far-west Rheinpreußen, Habermas was part of the generation of Germans who felt saved by the US Army when it liberated his town. He had been in the Deutsches Jungvolk, but as biographers are firm in pointing out, he found Nazism repellent from the beginning. His father Ernst, however, was an opportunistic political operator, who had joined the Nazi Party; he managed his de-Nazification process smoothly owing to his good English. Among the reading material he foisted on young Jürgen were the early writers of German Ordoliberalism, Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken. The young Habermas aspired to be a journalist before switching to a career as a philosopher. He first launched himself at twenty-four, with a legendary attack on Heidegger in the FAZ, in which he spotlighted not only the unoriginality and deceptiveness of the sixty-three-year-old former Nazi, but also how he had managed to dragoon the entire German philosophical tradition on behalf of the ‘psychosis of irrationalism’. Like an intellectual sanitation inspector, Habermas throughout his life would keep his sights trained on any seepages from the two main thinkers of the German right: Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. He monitored the body politic for signs of their recrudescence in the form of anti-rationalism or geopolitical realism.

It is sometimes forgotten that Habermas was at the start considerably to the left of his elder colleagues Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. He was a student of Wolfgang Abendroth, one of the few other operating Marxists at a German university in the 1950s. His closest kinship philosophically with anyone associated with the Frankfurt School was Herbert Marcuse. Stefan Müller-Doohm, in his biography, quotes an amusing letter from New York in which Habermas jokes with a friend that he’s just met the ‘terrible reactionary’ Hannah Arendt. Indeed, until he broke with the student movement in June 1967, Habermas was much more vociferous than his elders in his opposition to both the Vietnam War and the direction of West German society. Horkheimer found Habermas’s constant crying of fascism overblown, and worried he had an irresponsible radical on his hands, whose idea of ‘revolution’ called for social democracy with the full participation of all German citizens (better not try that again!). They eventually reconciled, but Habermas was always closer with Adorno – even though it was Adorno’s thought which came in for a more complete revision in the Habermas programme. In his mature writings, preserving the ‘lifeworld’ meant improving the conditions for democratization and communicative rationality, which he privileged over Adorno’s striving for non-capitalist consciousness.

It cannot be stressed enough how far the Frankfurt School of the 1960s was from the Marxism of the interwar period. The ‘Western Marxism’ of Frankfurt prided itself on retaining what it thought was living in the tradition – its dialectical method and style – while discarding its historical analysis, which it blamed for both the dangers of adventurism, from the March Action of 1921 to the Red Army Faction, and the political quietism of a left that passively expected history to work out for it. What would always separate Habermas from the likes of John Rawls was Habermas’s never-ceasing engagement with Marxism, right up to his last lecture in Frankfurt in 2019. He regularly reviewed the Marxist literature around him, maintained a correspondence with Hobsbawm, and never quite stopped seeing society through the lens of class struggle. His first major book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), was a work of tragic Marxism: the bourgeois capitalism of the eighteenth century that gave rise to the newspaper reading publics of England and the Netherlands had seemed to promise the freedoms of speech and thought that would produce a new society, but instead resulted in capitalism consuming public opinion itself. In Legitimation Crisis (1973), Habermas argued that capitalism, under which the owners of capital are constantly overthrowing the conditions that enable their own accumulation, was inherently crisis-ridden. The Keynesian state, by tempering the fall-out of economic shocks, had not only transferred crises back to the political sphere, but had also left citizens bent on private satisfaction grievously unready for political battle. What Habermas did not anticipate was how capitalist interests would reassemble in the 1980s and persuade states no longer to concern themselves with cushioning the population. Habermas’s most generative critic, Nancy Fraser, refurbished his thought for the post-Bretton Woods order, showing how neoliberals were able to overcome the legitimation crisis of the 1980s by reappropriating the language of freedom. This was hegemony pure and simple – ‘the discursive face of domination’.

No one of Habermas’s standing in Europe fell as hard for the linguistic turn and American pragmatism. He even went to the trouble of re-narrating human history from the neolithic age onward, with an eye for how communicative structures influenced historical change as much, or more than, the mode of production. His magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), marked the midway point between the young Marxist rehabilitator and searing critic of Adenauer’s Germany, and the later Habermas who became a tribune of the European Union. In the 1980s, his main outing as a public intellectual was in the Historikerstreit against right-wing historians like Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber, who wished to relativize the German past by comparing Nazi crimes to those of Stalin. Habermas’s thundering articles from this episode, written in his most effective prose, argued for the historical uniqueness of the Judeocide. This appeared to many commentators to be the progressive position. But over time the uniqueness argument would make things easier rather than harder for the German memory industry. The effect was to solidify the taboo of comparing German extermination to anything else.

More puzzling still is Habermas’s record on the wars prosecuted by the West since the end of the Cold War. He viewed 1989 as a virtually inevitable triumph of liberal democratic capitalism over its foes in the East. He backed the First Gulf War as a somewhat bumpy but necessary action for the formation of an international legal sphere. But there was also a more straightforward reason: ‘At least in regard to Israel – that is, the nightmare scenario of an Israel encircled by the entire Arab world and threatened with the most horrific kinds of weapons – the authorization for military sanctions against Iraq was justified.’ The bombing of Serbia, too, was a welcome intervention, not only because it was done in a spirit of good faith to prevent a genocide, but because it further soldered the Euro-American partnership. The lack of United Nations authorization would only come to bother Habermas during the second Iraq War, when the German-French core of the European Union no longer saw its interests as aligned with those of Washington. He took a long time to realize that the Union was not a beacon of human rationality that could ‘help other countries emerge from their nineteenth centuries’.

It was only with the Ukraine war that Habermas’s view of America as the needlepoint of civilization came fully into conflict with his long-standing aversion to nationalism. As German politicians started putting replicas of Leopard 2 Panzers on their desks, he noted that ‘We are all Ukrainians’ was a fatuous line of reasoning. He had not devoted his political life to post-nationalism only to have Germany re-nationalize by proxy just because Ukrainians were fighting valiantly on the battlefield. Ukraine, for this old Hegelian, was still at an earlier stage of history.

Fair enough. What was not said, however, and remained out of bounds of the discussion, was that another anachronistic ethno-national state had a free hand: Israel. When Habermas co-authored a response to American academics, including Nancy Fraser, who had denounced Israel’s war, the contradiction was glaring. ‘Despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population’, Habermas and his co-authors wrote, ‘the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.’ Great concern for Jewish Germans was evinced in the letter; none for their fellow Muslim citizens. I was at first inclined to read Habermas’s statement with some generosity. If one went by the distorted German public sphere alone – and Habermas always had a huge appetite for newspapers and television – it was, in fact, hard to get a clear picture of the Israeli invasion. But Habermas had a long history of being deliberately unquestioning of Israel. In 2012, he scolded Günter Grass for daring to write a poem about how Israeli nuclear weapons endangered regional peace. Habermas believed that to question German loyalty to Israel would constitute backsliding to the darkest layers of the German past. The father of the public sphere was even enough of a stickler on this point that he refused to sign a letter condemning the withdrawal of an invitation to Fraser to teach at the University of Cologne.

One would have to look far back for the original traces of Habermas’s locked-in Zionism. At his fiftieth birthday in 1979, he claimed to notice Marcuse’s discomfort when Gershom Scholem, fresh off the plane from Jerusalem, turned out to be the star of the show. ‘It was an advantage not to be Jewish when meeting Scholem’, Habermas recalled. ‘You did not fall into the category of intellectuals who made the great mistake of opting for an all too trusting assimilation.’ It seemingly never occurred to him that Marcuse might have had other reasons for sitting glumly on the sidelines of the early consolidation of German hyper-Zionism. There is no doubt that Habermas was a champion of freedom and open discussion, but he favoured them on specially chosen ground.

Read on: Jürgen Habermas, ‘A Philosophico-Political Profile’, NLR I/151.