4 min readMar 17, 2026 06:15 AM IST
First published on: Mar 17, 2026 at 06:15 AM IST
Reporting Jürgen Habermas’ death, the Associated Press described him as “one of the world’s most influential philosophers”. The German Chancellor said “Germany and Europe have lost one of the most significant thinkers of our time.” Read together, the two observations — where Germany or Europe may pass as the world’s conceptual core — index both the scope and limits of Habermas’ thinking.
Born with a cleft palate in Gummersbach (near Düsseldorf), the disability at birth made Habermas extra-sensitive to communication and language, which became central to his philosophical concerns. In his teens, Habermas, whose father was an adviser to the Nazis, joined the Hitler Youth. While vociferous in attacking Martin Heidegger’s fascism, Habermas’ own writings show no “guilt or shame” for fighting for Hitler, as Stuart Jeffries points out . After the defeat of the Nazis, he studied in Göttingen and Bonn, where he earned his doctorate in Philosophy. In 1956, he became research assistant to Theodor Adorno, a towering figure of the Frankfurt School, of which Habermas was the most famous contemporary theorist. Habermas’s 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, proved momentous. It was a watershed inquiry into the onset of the bourgeois public sphere as vital to Europe’s democracy.
Habermas wrote prolifically across a wide range of themes that transcended disciplinary boundaries. At the age of 94, he published a three-volume work on the history of philosophy, modestly titled Also a History of Philosophy.
In Habermas’s intellectual universe, the trajectory of modernity emerged in Europe, particularly in the post-Reformation world that, in his account, helped give rise to the Enlightenment and institutions of modernity. Protestant Christianity occupied a distinctive place in this narrative because of its “achievement” of secularisation. The rest of the world didn’t philosophically matter much, except perhaps as the “enlightened” West’s other. In his writings, especially after 9/11, Islam appears as the main other. The way to deal with this was to Christianise Muslims because they “still have to undergo this painful learning process (of secularisation)” and adopt “a historical-hermeneutic approach” to the Qur’an. Indifferent to minoritised views like Georg Diez’s that the Reformation initiated by Martin Luther, “a fear-driven fanatic”, aimed “to reinstate the power of God over the freedom of Man”, Habermas took to defending the post-Reformation Enlightenment and modernity, the latter as an “unfinished project”.
For defenders of Habermas, he was a star philosopher of the post-World War II era — except for his 2023 statement on Gaza, which justified the genocide of Palestinians. To them, this statement represented a deviation from his Enlightenment-defending philosophy. But as I have argued, the statement was instead an offshoot of his pre-2023 “good” philosophy. While The Theory of Communicative Action fruitfully discusses the “internal colonisation” of the lifeworld by the systems of Western plutocracies, he remained conceptually silent about external colonialism and imperialism at large. This silence, from a philosopher of “universalism”, speaks volumes about the philosophy he stood for. Habermas’s philosophy erased the ongoing brutalisation of Palestinians, who (un)live under Israeli settler colonialism.
Commentators on Habermas take him as (neo)Kantian. So does Habermas himself. From a decolonial framework, this is the problem. As the inaugural philosopher of the Enlightenment, Kant’s philosophical project was pitted against a series of others, notably Islam and Muslims. Habermas’s prejudice vis-à-vis Islam is thus beholden to the ethnic philosophy of the Enlightenment à la Kant as also to the orientalism of Max Weber, a key inspiration behind his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Many on the Left consider Habermas a radical and critic of capitalism. However, his stance on capitalism is at best reformist. After the Cold War’s end, for Habermas, the enemy was not capitalism but its “management”.
I end with his major contributions. First, he took ideas seriously and stood against rank empiricism and positivism: American-style behaviouralism with statistical data as deity. Second, he acted, though selectively, as a public intellectual to defy the divide between “pure” knowledge and public concerns. Third, despite manifold criticisms, his contribution to the public sphere remains vital.
co
