The philosopher, social theorist and defender of humane Enlightenment values Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, spent the last months of the second world war helping to protect the Third Reich. He was 15 and a member of the Hitler Youth. Too young to fight and too old to be exempted from war service, he was sent to the western front to man anti-aircraft defences.
He later described his father, the director of the local seminary, as a “passive sympathiser” with the Nazis and young Habermas shared that mindset. But he was soon shaken out of his and his family’s complacency by the Nuremberg trials and documentaries of Nazi concentration camps. “All at once we saw that we had been living in a politically criminal system,” he later wrote. His horrified reaction to what he called his fellow Germans’ “collectively realised inhumanity” constituted what he described as “that first rupture, which still gapes”.
His great leftist, Jewish teachers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer philosophised in that rupture. Their student would follow suit. Adorno and Horkheimer had returned from American exile after the war to re-establish the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, and were developing an interdisciplinary way of thinking called critical theory. Adorno, in particular, whose assistant Habermas became in 1956, mused on whether “one who escaped [Auschwitz] by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living”.
Habermas, perhaps because he was young and perhaps because he was not Jewish, went beyond his teacher’s guilt and despair. Where Adorno had developed a philosophical anti-method called negative dialectics, Habermas sought, like the titans of German philosophy – Kant, Hegel and Marx – to develop system and method. He did so in order to work out how, as he once wrote, “citizens could still exercise collective influence over their social destiny through the democratic process”.
He took from Adorno the need to create a “new categorical imperative that Hitler has imposed on mankind: namely, to order their thought and actions such that Auschwitz never reoccurs”. As social theorist, legal theorist, social critic and philosopher, he advocated a new direction for German thought after the Nazi period.
Born in Düsseldorf, Jürgen grew up in Gummersbach, to the east of Cologne. When the second world war ended he had two years of rearguard action against the allied advance behind him. He thus became part of the so-called “Flakhelfer-Generation” (anti-aircraft generation) of postwar intellectuals such as the novelist Günter Grass and sociologists Ralf Dahrendorf and Niklas Luhmann, intellectuals who had, as teenagers, helped to defend Hitler.
In 1946, he enrolled at the University of Bonn, later also studying philosophy at Göttingen and Zurich. He was hardly a radical: indeed, he spent four years between 1949 and 1953 studying the philosopher and one-time Nazi party member Martin Heidegger.
But Habermas challenged Heidegger in 1953 to explain what he meant in his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics by the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. Heidegger never replied, confirming for Habermas that German philosophy had failed in its moment of reckoning.
Heidegger’s silence seemed to him symptomatic of the repressive, silencing anti-discourse prevalent in the new Federal Republic. Just as Heidegger refused to acknowledge his support for the Nazis, so Konrad Adenauer’s government, mired in anti-communist jeremiads against its East German neighbour, refused to acknowledge or definitively break with Germany’s recent past.
By the time Habermas was appointed Adorno’s assistant at the institute in 1956, he had already obtained his PhD on the idealist philosopher Friedrich von Schelling. At Frankfurt he was exposed to Adorno and Horkheimer’s project of unmasking the so-called “positivist illusion” in natural and social sciences, whereby a theory is a correct mirroring of facts. Instead, following Hegel and Marx, Adorno and Horkheimer insisted that facts and theories are part of an unfolding historical process.
However, Adorno and Horkheimer’s so-called Dialectic of Enlightenment turned Hegel on its head: much influenced by the German sociologist Max Weber, they argued that the process of Enlightenment, which involved extending control over human beings, was not a historical progress to freedom and absolute knowledge but an extension of domination of power over people, an unwitting march that had led to the death camps.
Habermas shared in some of his teachers’ diagnosis. But he was unwilling to concede that the Enlightenment itself was caught in a bad dialectic that sabotaged human striving for emancipation. He argued in his habilitation thesis – the postdoctoral work required for a professorship – that there was another form of rationality, geared to understanding rather than means-and-ends success, that was not the cause of but the possible solution to our ills.
Horkheimer demanded changes to this thesis, and this, plus Habermas’s growing worries over his teachers’ contempt for modern culture, led him to quit Frankfurt in 1961 to finish his thesis at Marburg University, under the Marxist jurist Wolfgang Abendroth. The following year he became professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University and his habilitation thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Investigation of a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962), was published.
“By the ‘public sphere’, we mean first of all the realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed,” wrote Habermas. “Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion – that is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express their opinions – about matters of general interest.”
In the revivification of the public sphere, the role of intellectuals such as Habermas was key – they must guide debate towards a rational consensus, rather than allowing media manipulators to stifle freedom of expression.
Habermas argued that rationally achieved consensus, which Adorno’s negative dialectics implacably refused, was possible for human flourishing post Auschwitz. The barriers preventing the exercise of reason could be identified and reduced. Adorno lured Habermas back to Frankfurt in 1964, when he took over Horkheimer’s job as professor of philosophy and sociology. However, his developing philosophy was derided as politically tame by the student radicals of the late 1960s.
In June 1967, he shared a platform in Hanover with the student leaders Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl to discuss The University and Democracy: Conditions and Organisation of Resistance. Habermas spoke in support of the student radicals’ programme, but not their means. He rounded on Dutschke for pursuing revolution by “any means necessary”, arguing: “In my opinion, he has presented a voluntarist ideology which was called utopian socialism in 1848, but which in today’s context ... has to be called left fascism.”
Reason, Habermas maintained, was crucial to clear communication and such communication was a bulwark against fascism. Violence could have no role in that. The Enlightenment, Habermas concluded, continued to have “a sound core”. But in accepting the Enlightenment legacy Habermas was a man out of time – opposed not just by student radicals but by postmodernist thinkers.
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, said: “After the massacres we have experienced, no one can believe in progress, in consensus, in transcendent values. Habermas presupposes such a belief.” Habermas’s book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) defended those values against postmodernists – among them Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Postmodernism was never Habermas’s bag. It, like Dutschke’s politics, seemed to him to flirt with nihilism and so reminded him of the Nazi era. Emblematically, after leaving Frankfurt in 1971 to become co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Research Into Conditions of Living in a Scientific and Technological World, in Starnberg, a small lakeside town near Munich, he and his wife, Ute Wesselhoeft, whom he married in 1955, built a house inspired by the Bauhaus architect Adolf Loos.
There they raised three children in a house filled with light and books. The Habermases kept that home even after, in 1983, he returned to teach at Frankfurt. Its austere optimism suited him.
At the Max Planck Institute, Habermas developed the thoughts that would lead to his magnum opus, the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981). It was in part a retort to his now dead teachers Adorno and Horkheimer in that it argued for the emancipatory power of communicative reason against instrumental reason.
He worried that citizens were becoming disenfranchised in the modern system. Against this gloomy diagnosis, he pitted a hopeful “ideal speech situation” in which citizens are able to raise moral and political concerns and defend them by rationality alone.
Habermas wrote voluminously in disciplines including social theory, aesthetics, epistemology, sociology, communication studies, psychology and theology. Moreover, he commented in German papers on controversial issues of the day such as European integration, and engaged in public dialogues with figures as various as Derrida and Pope Benedict XVI.
Typical of his taste for public interventions was his involvement in the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel) which raged for four years from 1986.
The German historian Ernst Nolte had recently argued that “Auschwitz ... was above all a reaction born out of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution ... the so-called annihilation of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original.” Nolte argued that the Gulag Archipelago came before Auschwitz and inferred from this that Germany “reasonably” turned to nazism in the face of Bolshevik threat.
Four decades after the fall of Hitler, Habermas sensed that Nolte and other rightwing historians were trying to exonerate their nation. In a series of articles attacking this attempt “to make Auschwitz unexceptional”, he wrote of “the obligation incumbent upon us to keep alive ... the memory of the sufferings of those who were murdered by German hands”.
Eminent philosopher critics such as Richard Rorty and Slavoj Žižek have argued that the intellectual bulwarks that Habermas built against fascism were inadequate. They contended that the public sphere as a place of purely rational debate never existed, and that his cherished notion of communicative action was a utopian dream.
Against such criticisms, Habermas – utopian modernist living in a postmodern dystopia, most engaged of European public intellectuals – retorted in an interview: “If there is any small remnant of utopia that I’ve preserved, then it is surely the idea that democracy is capable of hacking through the Gordian knot of otherwise insoluble problems. I’m not saying we’re going to succeed in this; we don’t even know whether success is possible. But because we don’t know, we still have to try.”
Habermas kept trying and remained a public intellectual, always engaged about what his work had achieved. In 2015, for instance, the Guardian asked him about his fellow sociologist Wolfgang Streeck’s view that the Habermasian ideal of a united Europe was at the root of the Greek debt crisis, and that the European Union would not save democracy but abolish it. Habermas agreed.
He argued that the united democratic Europe he dreamed of was being perverted by EU institutions such as the council and commission as well as the European Central Bank, “in other words, the very institutions that are either insufficiently legitimated to take such decisions or lack any democratic basis … this technocratic hollowing out of democracy is the result of a neoliberal pattern of market-deregulation policies”.
But even as the EU looked to him increasingly like a technocratic cabal, Habermas held firm to his vision of a European-wide democratic community, not least, one might well think, as the best bulwark against the rise of populist movements that so painfully echoed the nazism of his youth – even as Brexit was being plotted: “I do not see how a return to nation states that have to be run like big corporations in a global market can counter the tendency towards de-democratisation and growing inequality – something that we also see in Great Britain, by the way.”
In 2023, Habermas was drawn into the question of whether Israel was perpetrating genocide in Gaza following the 7 October Hamas terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians. On 13 November that year, Habermas put his name to a statement called Principles of Solidarity, arguing that Israel’s military retaliation following the 7 October attacks was “justified” and that “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”.
“Despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population ... the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions,” said the statement, which was also signed by the political scientist Rainer Forst, the lawyer Klaus Günther and the peace researcher Nicole Deitelhoff.
In response, on 22 November, several leading figures influenced by the Frankfurt School published an open letter, appearing in the Guardian, effectively arguing against its most prominent living member. The principle of “never again”, a central tenet of Germany’s political identity since the horrors of the Nazi-led Holocaust of Europe’s Jewish population, must also mean staying alert to the possibility that what was unfolding in Gaza could amount to genocide.
Habermas carried on writing well into his 10th decade. Last year saw the publication of the last part of his three-volume Also a History of Philosophy, in which he explored how figures such as Kant, Hume, Marx, Kierkegaard and Peirce spurred the central themes of his philosophical enterprise – his pragmatist theory of meaning, his communicative theories of subjectivity and sociality, and his discursive theory of normativity.
His final book of conversations with colleagues, Things Needed to Get Better, appeared in English last November. It was both rebuke to his more defeatist teachers and to the manifold follies of our age.
“I view the attempt to make the world even the tiniest bit better,” he said, “or even just to be part of the effort to stave off the constant threats of regression that we face, as an utterly admirable motive.”
Ute died last year. He is survived by his children Tilmann and Judith. Another daughter, Rebekka, died in 2023.
• Friedrich Ernst Jürgen Habermas, philosopher and social theorist, born 18 June 1929; died 14 March 2026
