Celebrating Jürgen Habermas and the Institute for Social Research: Reflections on the history of critical theory from a jubilee year

Abstract

2024 was a jubilee year for the Frankfurt School. On July 24, the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), the birthplace of critical theory, marked its centennial. A month earlier, Jürgen Habermas, who is often seen as the intellectual leader of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, celebrated his 95th birthday. In Germany, these overlapping anniversaries have been met with the publication of a number of books on Habermas and the critical theory tradition more generally. Despite the globalization of theorizing within the tradition of the Frankfurt School over the past 50 years, much of its intellectual history of it is still produced in Germany by German scholars based on sources and archives held in the Federal Republic. This Spotlight reviews the main findings and conclusions of this literature for an international, English-speaking audience. It concludes by reflecting on whether critical theory has succeeded—and if so, how.

Introduction

2024 was a jubilee year for the Frankfurt School. The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung, hereafter IfS), the birthplace of critical theory, was founded on January 13, 1923. However, it first opened its doors and started operations on July 24 of the following year, making 2024 its 100th anniversary. A little over a month before this centennial, on June 18 to be precise, Jürgen Habermas, who is often seen as the intellectual leader of the second generation of the Frankfurt School despite never formally holding the directorship of the IfS, celebrated his 95th birthday.

In Germany, these anniversaries have been met with the publication of a number of books on the IfS, critical theory, and Habermas, which form the basis for this Spotlight. Since the 1980s, both the Frankfurt School and Habermas have been “deprovincialized” (Bailey, 2022) and increasingly represent “global” (Corchia et al., 2019) intellectual movements. As Habermas points out in a recent interview “the Frankfurt tradition is more alive today in the USA than in Germany” (2024: 22). ¹

In light of this internationalization of critical theory, it might seem parochial to focus this Spotlight on the German literature that appeared in 2024. My decision is guided by two main considerations. First, engaging with these works is a service to critical theorists who do not speak German. While some of the volumes covered here might eventually be translated into English, those interested in these issues might benefit from some of the insights contained in this scholarship before this occurs. Second, despite the global reach of theorizing within the Frankfurt School, much of the intellectual history of it is still produced in Germany by German scholars based on sources and archives held in Germany.

The purpose of this Spotlight is not only historical; in addition to looking back and highlighting some of the interesting “pearls” uncovered in the books I review here, I am also interested in how the Frankfurt School might help to feed “the world of the living,” to paraphrase Hannah Arendt's (1977: 50–1) description of Walter Benjamin's path-breaking historically presentist methodology. While I will not be able to venture an answer to the question posed by the former director of the IfS, Axel Honneth, as to “whether [critical theory] deserves to be pursued further or whether it is more advisable to leave it behind” (2023: 372), I conclude by reflecting what these books say about whether it has succeeded—and if so, how.

The early history of the IfS

In March of 2024, Philipp Lenhard published a new institutional history of the IfS entitled Café Marx, a reference to an early moniker given to the Institute by its students. Lenhard, a DAAD Professor (Deutscher Akademische Austauschdienst, roughly the German equivalent of the US Fulbright Program) at the University of California, Berkeley, who recently received a Ruf (“call”) to a professorship in Munich, is an intellectual historian. Just a few months after the publication of Café Marx, his 2019 biography of Friedrich Pollock (Lenhard, 2024b), a core member of the IfS who served as both its resident economist and its primary administrator, appeared in English translation as well.

In the first line of his new book, Lenhard refers to it as a “biography” (2024a: 7), even though its subject is an institute. Extending his personification of the IfS, he is quick to point out that neither the Institute nor the Frankfurt School is dead, as the subjects of most biographies are. However, despite its status as a living institution, he argues that he can treat its history as a closed narrative because the IfS is “no longer the center of this school” (p. 528) and has not been for some time. Although the Frankfurt School is “now everywhere,” the basic premise of the book is that knowledge of the early development of the IfS is necessary for anyone who wants to understand “what constitutes Critical Theory as such” (p. 7).

The subtitle, The Institute of Social Research from its Origins to the Frankfurt School (Das Institut für Sozialforschung von den Anfängen bis zur Frankfurter Schule), clarifies the book's scope. Unlike most histories of critical theory, which start with Max Horkheimer ascension as director in 1930, Lenhard devotes almost a third of this 500 page volume to its “pre-history” starting in 1918. While he concludes with a short chapter on its “afterlife,” the main narrative ends fifty years ago with the IfS's 1974 golden jubilee. In Lenhard's view, the celebration of its 50^th anniversary marks a key rupture (Verovšek, 2020), not only because it was preceded by the deaths of almost all of the key figures of the first generation, but also because this date marks the end of the IfS as the core “site” of critical theory.

In approaching his topic, Lenhard is guided by two key questions: “Where was ‘the Institute’ actually, and what concretely occurred there?” (p. 9). His focus on the first issue is visible in the fact that each chapter opens with a vignette of a specific time and place—at the beginning of each section this is also paired with a captioned photograph—that sets the stage for the narrative of the period in question. For instance, the first chapter starts at the end of World War I in the villa of Hermann Weil, whose son would endow the IfS six years later. At the time it served as a hospital for wounded German soldiers. This written description is paired with a photograph of the revolutionary demonstrations in Berlin on November 9, 1918, which both marked the end of the German Reich and the start of the socialist uprisings that preceded the foundation of the Weimar Republic. This scene thus sets the stage for the establishment of the IfS, which was initially devoted to studying the worker's movement and divining the reasons behind its failure.

Lenhard's second question leads him to focus on the main events, personalities, and constellations that shaped the development of the Institute. In the introduction, he notes his desire to highlight the contributions made by “peripheral figures (Randfiguren), including among others the women who worked at the Institute” (p. 9). While the achievements of the core members of IfS, which Lenhard presents as constituted of a series of “concentric circles” (p. 312) with Horkheimer and Pollock at its center, are well known, the Institute would not have produced the legacy it has without the work of many individuals whose names are often mentioned only in passing or in footnotes.

For instance, although he can hardly be considered marginal, Lenhard does a wonderful job of filling out the portrait and detailing the activities of Felix Weil, the Institute's primary financial benefactor. Like Horkheimer and Pollock, whom he got to know at a seminar they took together at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Hermann Weil's son was active in the socialist movement, even serving as a representative to the first Delegate's Congress of the Socialist Student Organization of the German Reich in Jena in 1919 (pp. 39–40). Lenhard's descriptions of Weil's activism provide much-needed background to his desire to establish a center where “Marxist scholarship and political engagement could connect with each other” (p. 42).

These early chapters provide the fullest description in the existing literature of the history of the IfS's foundation and of the difficult negotiations that brought it into being. Lenhard scrupulously documents how Weil was able to use his wealth, political connections, and business acumen to “go behind the back of the Minister of Culture…to establish an institute in the name of the Ministry, which was meant to have a Marxist research orientation from the start” (p. 51, see pp. 50–62) at a time when the conservative interwar political climate of the 1920s was hardly conducive to such an initiative.

In the course of his early narrative, Lenhard also unearths a number of interesting parallels between the initial directorship of the historian of the labor movement, Carl Grünberg, and the more celebrated leadership of Horkheimer that followed. In addition to the collective conception of work organized under “the dictatorship of the director” and a Hegelian orientation towards society as a totality (p. 104), he also documents Weil's early insistence that the Institute adopt an “obscuring, Aesopian language” (p. 219) to avoid unnecessary political conflicts. Although this purposeful avoidance of Marxist terminology is often attributed to Horkheimer, Lenhard shows that it was actually a guiding principle of the IfS as an institution from the start.

Lenhard's narrative adds to our understanding of the Frankfurt School's role in the “discovery” the early, Hegelian Marx of alienation, as opposed to the materialist, scientific, Marx of economic determinism propounded by the Soviet Union. The rise of what has come to be known as Western Marxism is usually dated to the 1931 publication of the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” that Marx wrote in Paris in 1844. In his influential review in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung—the Institute's house journal—Marcuse (1972: 3) argues that these texts not only “make it possible to pose the question of the actual connections between Marx and Hegel in a more fruitful and promising way”; in his view they also demonstrate “the inadequacy of the familiar thesis that Marx developed from providing a philosophical to providing an economic basis for his theory.”

Lenhard also shows that the IfS played a key role in ensuring their collection, reproduction, and publication. This position was made possible by Weil, who acted as an intermediary between the Social Democrats and the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. While both controlled some of the relevant materials, they did not trust each other to reproduce them faithfully given their growing ideological disagreements (pp. 130–143).

The archival expertise of the staff of the extensive library of the workers’ movement, “which was the heart of the Institute” (p. 107) in the 1920s, was crucial in this endeavor as well. While Karl Huber was its official leader, Lenhard reports that he obtained this position because “the Institute for Social Research was a patriarchally led research organization.” In fact, most of the work on these manuscripts was done by the archivists and library staff, most of whom—including Christiane Sorge, Rose Wittfogel, Elisabeth Ehrenrich, Carla Mackauer, and Susanne Weisser—were women (pp. 108ff).

Lenhard's focus on the contributions of women and other less celebrated figures does not mean that he ignores the core figures of the Institute. However, by treating them as members of an institution, Lenhard highlights how their work and their relationships developed over time—as the Institute itself also did. For instance, Lenhard highlights the efforts Horkheimer made to provide “a refuge for the homeless (ein Asyl für Obdachlose)” (Part IV) for other intellectuals from Germany. He calculates that between 1934 and 1944 the Institute had supported 116 doctoral scholars and 14 postdoctoral scholars with almost $200,000 in support, the equivalent of $4 million today (Lenhard, 2024b: 96). As Lenhard points out, after 1933 “the rescue of émigré scholars from Europe” was one of the IfS's “core projects (Kernprojekte)” (p. 328).

Finally, Lenhard traces the decline of the Institute as the center of critical theory. In part, this deterioration was financial, as much of Weil's endowment was lost or used up in the course of the Institute's many moves (from Frankfurt to Geneva, then on to New York and Santa Monica, before returning to Frankfurt in 1949) and the initiatives it funded during its exile. This corrosion is visible in its physical manifestation as well. Before the war, the IfS had owned its own purpose-built edifice in Frankfurt. However, by the time it had relocated to Santa Monica, it was reduced to a sign mounted on the wall of Marcuse's bungalow (p. 394).

Lenhard's narrative unearths a treasure trove of interesting tidbits and other “pearls,” which he not only brings up from the depths of the sea and into the world of the living but also expertly situates in their theoretical and historical context. Contemporary critical theorists often return to the first generation of the Frankfurt School for inspiration, arguing about which figure's work is most fruitful for diagnosing the pathologies of the present. Lenhard's decision to write a biography of the IfS as an institution demonstrates the futility of such an approach. The main normative payoff of Café Marx is thus to be found in Lenhard's contention that we not only have to pay attention to both the high philosophical ideals and the low politics that shaped the Frankfurt School, but also need to take the institutional framework that bound its many contributors—both major and minor—together into account as well.

Temporally and geographically, Lenhard's history ends in lecture hall VI of the Goethe University on the afternoon of 28 June 1974 with the celebration of the Frankfurt School's golden jubilee. While this event was not the end of the Institute, it was the start of what he calls “(post-)Critical Theory” (p. 527). In addition to Habermas, who ultimately took over Horkheimer's Chair in Philosophy and Sociology, several other figures also played a role in continuing this tradition. The work of this non-Habermasian second generation is taken up by Jörg Später (2024) in Adorno's Inheritance (Adornos Erben).

The second generation of critical theory

Später's volume appeared on 17 June, that is, a day before Habermas's 95^th birthday. Bearing the subtitle A History from the Federal Republic (Eine Geschichte aus der Bundesrepublik), it picks up where Lenhard leaves off. Although the first third covers critical theory's “school-building” period from 1949 to 1969, the introduction opens with a description of Adorno's funeral. For Später, a historian based at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, this event marks the beginning of a new phase, during which this tradition developed with “neither master nor center” (p. 10). In contrast to Lenhard's institutional biography, Später presents an “apostolic history (Apostelgeschichte)” focused on how the inheritors of the Frankfurt School “wrestled with each other regarding the appropriate understanding of Critical Theory” (p. 10, 11).

Additionally, whereas Lenhard treats Horkheimer and Pollock as the core constellation of the Frankfurt School, Später's book focuses on Adorno and his followers. Initially, Adorno's association with the IfS was rather loose. As a result, he moved to Oxford University to escape the Nazis in 1934, rather than following Horkheimer and the IfS itself, first to Geneva and then New York City. However, by the time the Institute had moved to California, Adorno “had become the intellectual leader of the Horkheimer circle” (p. 32). This position was solidified after its return to the newly established Federal Republic of Germany. It was only then that he became “the Adorno” (Habermas, 2024: 44), the academic superstar and “media intellectual” (Schildt, 2020) who shaped the political discourse of the early Bonn Republic.

Später justifies his focus on Adorno by pointing out that Horkheimer became the rector of the Goethe University in 1951, a position that left him little time for teaching and research alongside his directorship of the IfS. By contrast, this period was the first time that the Adorno, who most likely would not have received a position “anywhere else in the Federal Republic apart from Frankfurt,” had held a university professorship (initially this was actually a less prestigious “reparations chair [Wiedergutmachungslehrstühl],” p. 577). This meant that Adorno was finally able to supervise his own doctoral students and hire Habermas as his first personal assistant (see Verovšek, 2024: 187–90).

Später's volume delves into the careers and thought of twelve academic (note the apostolic number) heirs, as well as the “Frankfurt School's most important non-academic” (p. 77), the film director Alexander Kluge. The academics are: Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Karl Heinz Haag, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Rolf Tiedemann, Herbert Schnädelbach, Ludwig von Friedeburg, Oskar Negt, Gerhard Brandt, Helge Pross, Regina Becker-Schmidt and Elisabeth Lenk. Despite Adorno's stature in the Federal Republic of the 1960s, few of his philosophy students (the situation was somewhat better for his sociologists) obtained offers to permanent academic positions. This led Adorno to complain of “an unspoken conspiracy against my pupils (eine unausgesprochene Verschwörung gegen meine Schüler),” even giving rise to a sense that the German academe had said “yes to Adorno, to the students: no (Adorno ja, die Schüler: nein)” (quoted on pp. 132, 131).

Später's profiles of these figures are a significant contribution to the intellectual history of the second generation of the Frankfurt School in their own right. One important aspect of this book—this is a parallel with Lenhard—are Später's explicit efforts to highlight the role of women in the history of Frankfurt School. Pross, Becker-Schmidt, and Lenk all contributed to the German feminist movement of the 1970s, albeit in different ways. Whereas the sociologist Pross produced studies of gender and engaged in political activism, often appearing on television and writing columns on the social and economic role of women in popular magazines, as a literary scholar and sociologist Lenk theorized the pariah consciousness of many women in modern society and raised questions about the female aesthetic. Finally, the psychologist and sociologist Becker-Schmidt produced important empirical studies on female factory workers and contributed to the production of a “feminist critical theory” (Umrath, 2010), though Später does not like this term (see p. 432).

Despite their differences, they agreed that critical theory's “methods of social criticism are quite useful for feminist engagement” and criticized “the founding fathers (Gründerväter) of the Frankfurt School for their patriarchal attitudes” (p. 409, emphasis in original). Später concludes for all three critical theory “was not characterized by a fixed doctrine, but rather provided an arsenal of intellectual tools to examine society for its potential to reduce domination, in this case by means of an anti-patriarchal critique of domination” (p. 431). It is worth noting that in German, the word domination (Herrschaft) contains the word Herr (“sir,” “lord” or “Mr”) combined with the German equivalent of the suffix “-ship.” As a result, domination in German can thus be rendered as “Mr-ship,” a social phenomenon that is coded as essentially male.

In line with recent efforts to take account of the contributions made by the “wives of the canon” (Forestal and Philips, 2018), Später also highlights Gretel Adorno's contributions. In addition to her transcription of the discussions that resulted in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, he notes that after 1949 she was not only “ultra-present at the Institute” and played a key role in its administration but was also—in Lenk's words—“the real boss” (quoted on p. 105), as both Adorno and Horkheimer were often distracted by their writing. In addition to acting as “the guardian of Adorno's productivity,” Lenhard also credits Gretel for not only introducing Habermas not only “to the buried world of the displaced Jewish left-wing intelligentsia,” but more specifically to the work of Walter Benjamin (p. 86) (see Habermas, 2024: 42), who had also courted her before her marriage to Adorno.

Although Später's argues that over the course of the second generation, “critical theory spread from Frankfurt to the provinces of the country” (p. 11), it is surprising how many of Adorno's students were able to stay in Frankfurt and its environs. These included Friedeburg, who was the Cultural Minister of Hessen for a time, Tiedemann, who became the first generation's main archivist, the Institute's post-1972 director Brandt, as well as Schmidt and Schnädelbach, who became professors at the Goethe-University. Others, including Pross (Gießen and Siegen), and Haag, who taught retreated from academic life to live like a philosophical “hermit” in his house in the suburb of Höchst (pp. 249ff), stayed in the vicinity as well.

The rest of Adorno's apostles were indeed “scattered to the four winds” (p. 188). However, a number of them succeeded in building new centers of critical theory. Most notably, Negt, Becker-Schmidt and Lenk all ended up in Hannover. Although Schweppenhäuser, who devoted much of his career to the Benjamin Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), was alone at the newly established pedagogical university in Lüneburg, he created another hub there by offering “asylum to many followers of the old Critical Theory who were unable to find a place at a university due to their political views and stubborn distance from the ‘academic establishment’” (p. 580).

Most English-speaking scholars associate the second generation with the “communicative framework outlined by Jürgen Habermas” (Marasco, 2006: 88). However, in his last substantive chapter, Später pushes back on this understanding. Instead, he documents the surprisingly bitter “inheritance dispute” (Erbschaftsstreit, pp. 477–505) that played out between Habermas, who over the course of the 1970s developed a new linguistic paradigm of critical theory in Starnberg, a wealthy suburb of Munich in southern Germany, and his colleagues in Hannover and Lüneburg, who remained within the historical-materialist framework of the first generation. Most notably, following the publication of Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action in 1981, his opponents produced several conferences and edited volumes guided by the motto “Against Habermas” (p. 498).

Despite his detailed description of it, Später does not take a position on the conflict between “left-wing Habermasians,” who “are keen to show that the zone of agreement between Adorno and Habermas is as broad as possible,” and the proponents of Adorno, who “insist on a ‘caesura’ between old Critical Theory and Habermas's thinking” (p. 501). Später is hardly the first to identify a tendency to pit ‘the “good” Adorno against the “bad” Habermas’ (Specter, 2019: 332) as a key conflict within the tradition of the Frankfurt School. In addition to the “hardened partisans” on both sides, some prominent interpreters, including Peter Gordon (Whited, 2022), have sought a middle ground by “mediating the problems that preoccupied Adorno/Horkheimer and the problems that preoccupy Habermas.” Surprisingly, is the position that Philipp Felsch ends up defending in his 2024 biography of Habermas.

A new portrait of Habermas

Over the course of his long live Habermas has been the subject of several biographies, including Stefan Müller-Doohm's (2016) encyclopedic treatment and Roman Yos’s (2019) recent book on the “young Habermas.” As a result, it is not surprising that 2024 has provided us with yet another account. What is interesting, however, is that it comes from Philipp Felsch, a professor of cultural studies at the Humboldt-University, who—as the dustjacket of the book notes—for most of his career “preferred to read the books by Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann,” i.e., two of Habermas's most notable intellectual adversaries.

Despite his anti-Habermasian predispositions, The Philosopher presents a sympathetic account of its protagonist. Felsch, whose previous book The Summer of Theory (Felsch, 2021) was recently translated into English, bookends his narrative with accounts of two visits to Habermas's house in Starnberg. He reports being surprised by “the charisma that he displays in conversation, which I was not familiar with either from his books or his public appearances” (Felsch, 2024: 13).

Given the fact that he has made a name for himself as an essayist and a translator of academic concepts for the broader reading public, it should not be surprising that Felsch does not focus his narrative on Habermas's academic work. Instead, he zooms in on Habermas's interventions as a public intellectual (see Verovšek, 2021), with which Habermas helped “shape, more than almost anyone else, the political debates of the old Federal Republic” (p. 8). By focusing on the “Socrates of the Federal Republic” (p. 33), Felsch also takes a clear position on Habermas's place vis-à-vis Adorno.

Although Felsch wryly notes that intellectually speaking Habermas only seems to have followed Adorno in his rejection (or, more accurately, ignorance) of pop culture (p. 47), he also observes that after Adorno's death Habermas became West Germany's leading public intellectual (Müller-Doohm, 2005). On this account, Habermas can still be considered an epigone of the Frankfurt School because he has taken up Adorno's task of “speaking with the voice of the victim in the land of the perpetrators” (p. 26) and thus “shaping the German culture of remembrance with his positions on the politics of the past (vergangenheitspolitischen Positionen)” (p. 7). It is also in this capacity that Felsch offers Habermas his begrudging admiration.

Felsch's short chapters touch on Habermas's contributions to a number of the key debates in the history of the Federal Republic, including his influential 1953 attack on Heidegger for failing to denounce his connections to Nazism, his participation in and ultimate break from the student movement of the 1960s and his contributions to the Historians’ Dispute over the meaning of Nazism for the present, all the way to his recent interventions regarding Germany's response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The narrative is hardly comprehensive, nor does it have a unifying logic outside the fact that these incidents covered are the ones where Habermas most affected Felsch. As he reports in the introduction, “Ever since I can remember, Habermas was always ‘around’” (p. 8, the word around appears in English in the original). This personalistic impression is reinforced by the fact that Felsch often uses incidents from his own life as entry points for his chapters.

As a result, the title of Felsch's book, The Philosopher: Habermas and Us, is something of a misnomer. Rather than emphasizing how Habermas has affected the lives of “us” (presumably Germans), a most accurate subtitle would probably have been “Habermas and me.” Additionally, for a book entitled “The Philosopher,” Felsch devotes remarkably little attention to Habermas as a philosopher, mostly focusing on Habermas as the defining public intellectual of his era. In light of this, I also wonder why the book is not entitled The Intellectual instead.

Despite this false advertising, Felsch's book still brings out a number of interesting aspects of Habermas. This is especially true of the introduction and conclusion, where he discusses Habermas's view of the situation in Ukraine. Two months after the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, Habermas (2022) published an essay pushing back against “the self-assurance with which the morally indignant accusers in Germany are going after an introspective and reserved federal government” for not immediately providing Ukraine with the weapons it needed. In it, Habermas acknowledges that the conflict “unleashed arbitrarily by Russia” has resulted in “the new scenes of raw destruction and shocking suffering produced each day.” However, he also voices support for Chancellor Olaf Scholtz's level-headedness (Besonnenheit) and his desire to think things over before sending arms to Kyiv, a move that would herald “a historic shift (Zeitenwende) in the German postwar mentality”—which Habermas played a key role in creating—“and thus the end of the broad pro-dialogue, peace-keeping focus of German policy.”

Habermas was understandably subjected to much criticism for this position, in particular from those who saw his rejection of indicting Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes since the “end of the war, or at least a cease-fire, must still be negotiated with him” as an abdication of his long-standing calls for the “constitutionalization of international law” (Habermas, 2008). In Felsch's words, “what is remarkable about his comments on the Ukraine war is not their supposed pacifism or defeatism, but the implicit admission that he has completely lost faith in the possibility of a global domestic policy (Weltinnenpolitik)” (p. 183) a concept initially developed by Carl Friedrich Weizsäcker (Habermas, 1958), with whom Habermas would later direct the Max-Planck Institute in Starnberg.

Given Habermas's own generational experiences and his view of the Federal Republic's pacifist, multilateral, economic- rather than military-based foreign policy as a hard-won “a historical achievement” (Habermas and Derrida, 2003: 294), his reticence about Germany becoming a “normal” country with a “normal” foreign policy is not surprising. Habermas's objections were not driven so much by the fact that the Federal Republic ultimately did end up providing weapons to Ukraine, but by the speed of this change, which “did not trigger any anguished reflection, but instead immediately prompted a highly emotionalized war mentality…in the rush to identify with the events of the war” (Habermas, 2023b). However, eighty years after the fact, it is also not surprising that popular opinion has started to shift away from Habermas's post-Holocaust perspective, a fact that Habermas observes left him with the sense—“for the first time” (quoted on p. 16)—that he was no longer able to understand the reactions of the German public.

In light of all this, Felsch reports leaving his first meeting in the spring of 2022 with the sense that he had “experienced the end of something,” though he was not sure whether it was the end of the seventy-year relationship between an engaged intellectual and his public or the “end of the old Federal Republic” (p. 16), which Habermas had defined. This sense was reinforced again upon Felsch's return visit in September 2023. By this time further developments in Ukraine (Habermas, 2023a) combined with the “decline (Niedergang) of political institutions in the USA” (p. 186)—a country that Habermas had always admired and perhaps even idealized—led him to observe that he had abandoned his former hopes for the onset of a most cosmopolitan condition, with the words: “That is all in the past” (quoted on p. 187).

Reflecting on these statements in light of Habermas's 95^th birthday makes one wonder whether, in addition to benefiting from what Chancellor Helmut Kohl famously called the “grace (Gnade) of a late birth,” which allowed Habermas to personally experience the Third Reich without having to bear any responsibility for its crimes, Habermas is now suffering from what we might see as the “cruelties of a long life” insofar as he has not only survived almost all of his contemporaries—the generations who could truly understand where he was coming from—but also outlasted his historical moment. Or at least this seems to be the implicit but overarching thesis of Felsch's book.

Returning to the tradition of critical theory, Felsch closes by quoting Habermas as he reflects on his life at the end of their second conversation. Of all his achievements, Habermas notes the “stroke of luck (Glücksfall)” that led him “to have met so many important Jewish scholars in the USA, in Israel and also in Germany” (quoted on p. 188). This is a theme that is also taken up by the final book covered in this Spotlight, a series of interviews with Habermas conducted by two of his recent biographers, Stefan Müller Doohm and Roman Yos (Habermas, 2024).

In his own words

Over the course of his career, Habermas has given many interviews (over 250 by one count), both in his capacity as a philosopher and as a public intellectual (Corchia et al., 2019: 761). “It had to get somewhat better…” (»Es musste etwas besser werden…«) is not even the first collection of extended interview that Habermas has published as an independent volume; on the contrary, there have been at least two others (Habermas, 1992, 1994).

This most recent book was originally supposed to focus on the development of Also a Philosophy of History (Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie) (Habermas, 2019), Habermas's two-volume treatment of the philosophical discourse between faith and knowledge published in 2019. However, in explaining how it was that Habermas, a secular thinker who for most of his career described himself a “religiously unmusical” (a phrase he borrows from Max Weber), it soon became clear to the editors that “the joint discussion project required a scientific biographical classification (eine wissenschaftsbiographische Einordnung)” as well. As a result, with Habermas's consent they expanded the parameters of their conversation—most of which occurred via email given the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and Habermas's often stated preference for the written over the spoken word—to cover “how the various influences from the generation of his academic teachers, his circle of colleagues and finally his students…initially served as motives and developmental cues (Entwicklungsrichtungen) for his work and how he judges this process of adoption and reception from today's perspective” (p. 246).

The book itself is divided into six chapters, organized more or less chronologically. Starting with Habermas's early life (1), this “scientific biography” then proceeds to cover his time at the IfS in Frankfurt from 1956–59 and the period he spent in Heidelberg as an “extraordinary professor (außerordentliche Professor), a position that was arranged by Hans-Georg Gadamer (2). The subsequent chapters are more thematic, moving from Habermas's participation in the “Positivism Dispute” (Positivismusstreit), where he and Adorno joined forces, and his critique of functionalist reason (3), to his development of post-metaphysical thinking and detranscendentalized reason (4), two central concepts from his communicative turn of the 1970s. Only then does the discussion arrive at the original topic of the book, Habermas's history of the relationship between science and religion, a topic that was also the subject of an edited collection published earlier this year (Müller-Doohm et al., 2024). The final chapter then examines Habermas's “philosophical discourse” (Habermas, 1987) with his friends and colleges (6).

Although each is organized around key periods and concepts in Habermas's philosophical development, the conversations are wide-ranging and often stray into other areas as well. For example, although there is no chapter devoted to Habermas's public interventions or to his thoughts on the current state of the world, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine comes up in this book as well. As in the Felsch volume, Habermas reiterates that what worries him about the reactions to the largest land war in Europe since 1945 is not “the spontaneous and decisive partisanship against the brutal aggressor,” but how “quickly the approaches and insights that had been hard enough to achieve [in Germany] since the Second World War crumbled among the political elites and in the press” (p. 149). Beyond the confines of the Federal Republic, he is also critical of “the short-sightedness of a conceptless (konzeptionslosen) West,” which “without taking any initiative of its own, has abandoned itself to the reflexes practiced during the Cold War” (pp. 149, 150).

While Habermas's pleas of negotiations to end the war have often been seen as capitulation to Putin, they also reflect his “political pacifism,” i.e., his desire “to abolish or transform certain institutions which he sees as responsible for war” (Haiden, 2024: 198). These comments also raises the issue of political leadership. Although this concept does not play a role in Habermas's political theory, in recent years it has become an increasingly important theme in his political writings, where he has repeatedly complained about the current leadership of Germany as being “normatively disarmed (normativ abgerüstet)” (Habermas, 2010) insofar as it is narrow-mindedly concerned only with day-to-day domestic political problems.

These first five chapters contain many interesting details and tidbits, in addition to some of the clearest explanations of some of Habermas's most complicated philosophical ideas. The informal tone and the obvious trust Habermas feels towards his biographers-turned-interviewers is also visible in some of his candid reflections on his career. For example, when asked to reflect on the reception of his ideas, Habermas is shockingly pessimistic about the impact of his work for someone who can realistically claim to be the most important living philosopher.

While he notes that key ideas like “the structural transformation of the public sphere” (Habermas, 1989) and the mediation of “facts and norms” (Habermas, 1996)—both of which reference titles of two of his most important books—more generally Habermas argues that outside of legal and moral philosophy he sees “only isolated productive continuations of my philosophical ideas” as “what I myself consider to be important hinges of my theory have not been taken up and continued in ongoing discussions.” In expressing his “lack of optimism” regarding the reception of his ideas among his peers Habermas immediately blames this on himself, noting, “What is missing [from my oeuvre] is the one central book that gives you the whole of the author's work ‘in the palm of your hand,’ as in the case of Hannah Arendt's Human Condition” (p. 112). Of course, given Habermas's productivity and willingness to adjust his theory in response to criticism, such a book would soon have been outdated.

Despite the interesting reflections sprinkled throughout this volume, it is Habermas's reminiscences in the final chapter that most caught my attention. While philosophers are generally known as not employing good citation practice, often taking credit for ideas that are not theirs in their quest for originality, throughout his career Habermas has published an extraordinary number of essays on other thinkers who have influenced his work. When asked about this, Habermas is taken aback, noting, “I do not really know why I perhaps do this more than others.” He then observes that “[i]t is a matter of friendship,” before lamenting, “Recently I have been writing these [reflections] more and more often from the sad perspective of lonely old age…from the point of view of a survivor” (p. 187).

Although Habermas does not mention this, his publication of essays on thinkers who have influenced him may also be related to his philosophical approach, in which he “takes over other theories” in what he admits is often “a rather brutal manner, hermeneutically speaking” (quoted in Honneth et al., 1981: 30). Drawing on Habermas's own reference to his attempts to figure out whether a philosophically interesting “new flower or herb” he has found “will fit together with other ones, whether it can create a bouquet or pattern,” Felsch (2024: 74) concludes that Habermas is indeed “a diligent botanist, who has arranged many flowers in his theory of communicative action.” This methodology may help to explain why so many of Habermas's essays address intellectual figures who have influenced his thinking in important ways.

Over the course of his career, Habermas has had a complicated relationship with the Frankfurt School. He even once famously observed, “For me there was no critical theory” (quoted in Honneth et al., 1981: 7). However, reflecting on his this association with this tradition in this recent interview, he notes that one of the only times that he truly “felt that I was taken seriously as the later-born (nachgeboren) representative of [the IfS]” was in New York City in 1967 when he was confronted by Hannah Arendt and a group of other German émigrés who all had a “suspicious, almost hostile view of Adorno” and was asked “with a sharp tongue and a slightly inquisitorial tone, about Horkheimer and Adorno and about the position of the Institute for Social Research in the German Federal Republic” (p. 192). In this sense, whether Adorno's other heirs like it or not, from the outside Habermas is clearly seen as both a product and carrier of the Frankfurt School.

Conclusion

Where do these four books on critical theory published in this jubilee year leave us? While their points of emphasis are all different, they highlight some broader trends. For instance, at the end of the collection of interviews I was just discussing, Habermas reflects on the increasing internationalization of critical theory and philosophy. While he observes that he still prefers to write in German, he also notes the benefits of increased academic dialogue across linguistic, political and geographical borders. Reflecting on the international success of contemporary critical theorists like his student Rainer Forst, who have “gained recognition in American political theory, I ask myself whether he is still perceived as a German colleague at all—or whether that is still relevant” (p. 228)

One of the guiding principles of this Spotlight has been that this distinction is still relevant, at least for the intellectual historiography of the Frankfurt School. Although critical theory has increasingly become an international intellectual movement, in analyzing its past, considering its present and reflecting on its future, focusing on its German origins is still important and worthwhile. This is just as true when reflecting on Habermas's comments on Ukraine, which emerge from a specifically German context, as it is when considering the patriarchal context of the early IfS and the effect this had on the role that women played in the early Frankfurt School.

In reference to this last point, both Lenhard's and Später's efforts to foreground key female figures in the history of critical theory provide an important corrective to past treatments of this material. However, there is only so much that can be done in this area given the context of the interwar period. To truly highlight the key role women have played in the history of critical theory, it would be necessary to go further into the future and across the Atlantic, where individuals like Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser and Jean Cohen have played a leading role in not only popularizing the Frankfurt School, but also in the further developing it. Today, women like Amy Allen, Simone Chambers, and Rahel Jaeggi are leading voices. The result is that it is now possible for young critical theorists like me to have obtained an education in the Frankfurt School from exclusively female supervisors in both undergrad and graduate school (in my case, from Allen and Benhabib).

The leading role of women in critical theory today can surely be counted as a great success for the Frankfurt School. It is not the only one, however. For Lenhard, the continuing influence of the IfS is made clear by the fact that students “who are interested in critical theory still make pilgrimages to Frankfurt” (p. 529), much as I did during my PhD. Although they are often disappointed by what they find, he argues that Frankfurt's intellectual legacy is still felt not only in the amount of global attention the thinkers of the first generation continue to attract, but also in the fact that today a “return to Marx” must take the Holocaust and the Moscow Trials of 1936–8, as well as both the crimes of the Stalin and Hitler Regimes, into account if it is to “count” as critical theory (p. 533).

In line with the subtheme of the intersection of critical theory and feminism, in his book Später argues that both movements “have failed—but successfully! They were successful because they are still used and needed (gebraucht)…. They failed because the problems for which they were created still exist” (p. 432). Although the IfS's approach to social theory through the concept of totality has been marginalized in the academy today, Adorno's “existential judgment about the falseness of society” is as relevant as ever. In this sense, Später concludes, “As long as the death of critical theory is repeatedly proclaimed, it will still be alive” (p. 587).

Compared to these external judgments, Habermas's views about the state of his own theory and of the world more generally are even more striking—and disturbing. Felsch reports that during their second conversation, Habermas observed that he increasingly felt like “everything that had made up his life was currently being lost ‘step by step.’” Habermas made a similar comment to me during my visit to him earlier this year to discuss my own forthcoming biography of him as a public intellectual. When I asked him a question about his conviction that the EU could anchor a more democratic “postnational constellation,” he replied to me: “That is all over (dass ist alles vorbei). I no longer believe in that.”² I can only second Felsch, who notes, “It is dismaying (bestürzend) to see Habermas—the last idealist—so fatalistic” (p. 187).

This is not to say that Habermas has lost all hope. Much like the tradition of critical theory today, which has been increasingly reduced to a Flaschenpost, a “message in a bottle” that may still be relevant to future generations, Habermas still maintains his belief in the ability of individuals acting communicatively together in the public sphere to make a real difference in the world. Speaking to Müller-Doohm and Yos, Habermas notes:

Although I find this more difficult than ever today in the face of overwhelming political regression, philosophically my belief remains the same: we are the ones who have to pull ourselves together! From the point of view of the radical reformism I have always defended, the more pessimistic the assessment of the situation, the more voluntaristic the answer must be (p. 148).

If critical theory can still provide the impetus for the opinion- and will-formation—to borrow a Habermasian phrase—necessary to meet the current moment, then it will undoubtedly be considered a success.