The contested legacy of Jürgen Habermas: Reason,critical dialogue,critique

Abstract

The essay offers an evaluation of the legacy of the writings of Jürgen Habermas. In part personal, it considers the fate of critical theory, especially in light of Habermas's turn to normative political philosophy. I argue that the core of his work was to find normative foundations of reason in human communication, which is open-ended but fragile. The guiding thread in his writings was that truth claims are implicit in communication and are what enables critique, providing it with its conditions of possibility. This is ultimately what allows human beings to transcend historical experience and what provides them with a constant orientation to the future. The distinctive achievement of his work was a conception of modernity as the expansion in the reach of reason, such that domination is constantly challenged by people demanding justifications for the exercise of power. The threads of reason are interwoven into the fabric of social life, enabling people to challenge power. However, despite the sociological importance of this perspective, his later work despite its unquestionable value for deliberative democratic theory lacked engagement with pressing political problems and social struggles.

Jürgen Habermas, who died in Starnberg on the 14^th of March 2026 at the age of 96, was one of the towering intellectual figures of the past fifty or so years. He was undoubtedly the most important European thinker since at least the early 1980s. An assessment of his legacy is difficult because he was not just a major social and political theorist who wrote important works in sociology and philosophy, but he also acquired almost heroic status as one of the great European thinkers and he was tremendously influential. As reflected in the extraordinary number of prizes and honours for many works that within his lifetime had become classics, his legacy was canonized, effectively putting it beyond critical assessment. Many of these works no longer speak to the present time but they shaped how we think. Within Germany he was venerated almost as if he were the state philosopher and he seemed to accept that adoration as the first great German philosopher of democracy. But he was for most students of social and political theory the chief representative of the critical theory tradition going back to Adorno and Horkheimer. It was impossible not to engage with his work. Habermas brought critical theory closer to democratic political theory, which I think was ultimately his ambition, to be a European Rawls, but it did come at a price for sociology. ¹

His death seems to mark the end of an era, although it is less clear what that era was or how one should view it. He is perhaps the last of the great European thinkers – along with Foucault and Bourdieu – who shaped the post-Second World War intellectual milieu in Europe with a new theoretical paradigm, in his case a ‘grand theory’, a systematic sociological theory based on rigorous philosophical analysis. His work was always a reference point for wider debates and his writings until the end were always eagerly awaited and read for whatever diagnosis of the age they might offer. Indeed, he served that function well, the need or desire for a diagnosis of the age. His heroic stature was in the end related to the belief that he had insights into the world that others lacked.

I cannot help feeling that his passing marks the end of the critical theory tradition, which did not quite survive his late work. If it survives, it will have to take a new form, and I think it is important it is rescued. I do not think this should be left for philosophers. In my own work, such as Critical Theory and Social Transformation (Delanty, 2020) and Senses of the Future (Delanty, 2024), I tried to rescue what I saw as the important strands. But there is no doubt that towards his final years his main influence was in legal theory and in political theory. His influence in social theory sadly waned by the end of the 1990s.

Habermas reoriented critical theory from the impasse to which T. W. Adorno brought it. While there is a lasting fascination with the writings of Adorno, his legacy was ultimately the posthumous Aesthetic Theory, published in 1970, and the 1966 Negative Dialectics (Adorno, 1973 [1966], 2013 [1970]). The old critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer that culminated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, one of the seminal philosophical works of the mid-twentieth century, placed the Holocaust as the central problem of modernity (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979 [1944]). Habermas's reorientation of critical theory rightly did not question that interpretation, but in the 1970s, after the death of Adorno, he made critical social theory more relevant for the late twentieth century, with major social and political change in western societies opening up new perspectives. While not diminishing the horrors of the Second World War, Nazism, and Holocaust, Habermas gave a sound philosophical and sociological basis for a new conception of emancipation. Reading his work – my introduction was the collection of essays in Theory and Practice (Habermas, 1970 [1961]) – in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a graduate student, I saw him as a theorist of emancipation along with Herbert Marcuse, who had earlier in Reason and Revolution and in Eros and Civilization also sought to bring Freud into Hegelian Marxian social theory (Marcuse, 1977 [1941], 1955).

The ‘interest in emancipation’ was clearly the aim of Human and Human Interests, which was a product of the concern with emancipation as the opposite of domination (Habermas, 1978 [1968]). Typical of the time, it did not explore the complexity of emancipation, which might be for some domination, a predicament Michel Foucault was already aware of. The two volume Theory of Communicative Action [TCA] in 1981 was part of the new hope for emancipation held by the New Left (Habermas, 1984/1987 [1981]). One of the problems with this emancipatory turn in critical theory is that from our vantage point today the critique of domination was naive and simply not able to address the multiple forms of domination. This perhaps explains why many became more attracted to Foucault's work, since it was much more tuned into power and domination, which after all is what sociology is primarily about. Despite his concern with emancipation, Habermas seemed to be curiously uninterested in exploring the workings of domination other than recognizing the fact of its existence. However, there was no doubt that domination was what gave rise to the need for critique, as he made clear in his critique of Gadamer's hermeneutics (Apel et al., 1971).

Habermas's project was more about identifying the normative foundations of emancipation, which initially he found in dialogue and subsequently in the constitutional democratic state. In my opinion, this was a successful venture and has been much misunderstood. Undoubtedly now since he has passed away, there will be many commentators announcing (yet again) the end of the Enlightenment, with Habermas as its last defender. Letting aside for now the question of what it means to invoke the Enlightenment; I think this is an unfounded and pointless criticism of his work. While he did see his work as a continuation of the Enlightenment, as is clear from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas, 1987a), it is a simplification of the notion of reason in his work to see it in such terms. This makes it an easy target.

The core of Habermas's work was to find normative foundations of reason in human communication. The theory rests on the thesis that human communication, which is a form of action, contains validity claims. The three main ones are those of truth, rightness, and sincerity. Communication cannot avoid truth (references to objective reality), nor rightness (conformity to the normative rules of the social world), and it cannot avoid sincerity. This theoretical framework, originally referred to as ‘universal pragmatics’, locates the foundations of reason not in a domain beyond the lifeworld, or outside of history, or in some meta domain. Validity claims are inherent in language and need to be redeemed. This theory, based as it was on a notion of linguistic competences, was central to the theory of communicative action. It meant that the sociological expressions of reason resided not in the state nor in the domain of culture, but in speaking subjects. This conception of reason required distinguishing it from rationality, as in, for example, the notion of instrumental rationality.

His critics made two errors, though they could be forgiven for this, as Habermas was not always very clear on what followed from this theory. One error was to say that he was advancing a theory of communication that cast it in terms of consensus over conflict, when in fact the point was that consensus, as opposed to force, is a condition of the possibility of communication. It does not mean that communication will result in consensus. Communication can be dissonant, distorted and contradictory, but the possibility of critical dialogue must not be ruled out. The ‘ideal speech situation’ was not then a real one in the sense of being always actual; but of course, it is real in the deeper sense of being unavoidably presupposed by people when they communicate. Indeed, the fact of conflict arises because the structure of human communication enables problematization, reflection and self-questioning. His argument was that validity claims are implicit in communication and are what allows for critique, providing it with its conditions of possibility. This is ultimately what allows human beings to transcend historical experience and provide them with a constant orientation to the future.

However, there is no doubt that the strong emphasis on ‘reaching an understanding’ – the term of TCA – through ‘the unforced force of the better argument’ – to use the term in the later discourse ethics – seemed to lessen issues of conflict and struggle. I also made this criticism, namely that his work was not very effective in addressing deep conflicts, such as those of the lifeworld where divisions run very deep (Delanty, 1997). For example, for people whose historical experience is so utterly dire, dialogue is not a viable option. I do not think this invalidates Habermas's theoretical framework, but it does delimit it.

The second error was to see Habermas's project as a defence of the European Enlightenment tradition, with the grounding of reason in validity claims having some special basis in European culture. It is true that he saw modernity as carrying forward reason in the autonomous value spheres of science, art and morality, following Kant and Weber, and that consequently he was defending the ‘unfinished project of modernity’, to refer to a classic essay based on a speech given by Habermas on receiving the Adorno Prize in 1980 (Habermas, 1987b [1981]). However, there was no necessary connection with universalist claims and particular historical cultures.

My contention is that what is important is the conception of reason, not modernity and not the Enlightenment understood as an age. If the game were up for reason that would be bad news, but the obsession with modernity and the Enlightenment I think confuses the issue. I acknowledge the lesser notion of ‘enlightenment’, understood as an orientation or attitude, as in Kant's famous essay of 1784, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’, rather than as a historical era (Kant, 1977). A lot has been written about the ‘postmodern turn’ cancelling modernity, when at best it should be seen as its continuation, as Zygmunt Bauman argued in Legislators and Interpreters (Bauman, 1987; Delanty, 2000). ² The debate was also confused because, in the Anglo-American reception, postmodernism referred to a phase within capitalism, as in the work of David Harvey (1987) and Frederic Jameson (1991). However, I do concede that Habermas misunderstood his own endeavour, which was a universalistic one, albeit a minimalistic universalism, and he associated it too much with the particularism of European modernity and, still worse, the Enlightenment.

What is the Enlightenment? There are numerous ones, Jonathan Israel's (2002) ‘Radical Enlightenment’, Isaiah Berlin's (1979) ‘counter-Enlightenment’, Carla Hesse's (2003) ‘other Enlightenment’, J. J. Clarke's (1997) ‘Oriental Enlightenment’. Announcements of its end began as soon as it began, as in 1804 with Beethoven tearing up of the dedication to Napoleon, who had declared himself Emperor, in Symphony Number Three, the Eroica, the ‘heroic’ symphony. Modernity, as is now well established in works by S. N. Eisenstadt, Johann Arnason, and Peter Wagner, exists in a variety of forms, and they are entangled in each other such that none is pure. One trajectory may have come to an end, while others continue and take new forms. There was nothing in Habermas's work that acknowledged such perspectives.

The emphasis on validity claims might not have offered enough for critical theory, since it was primarily a matter of justification, i.e., how arguments can be justified. It is nonetheless a fundamental error to see these endeavours as an empirical thesis that modernity created institutions that embody reason. Habermas can certainly be read in a way that suggests such an interpretation, but this is also because modernity did lead to the expansion in the reach of reason, namely the idea that in modern times domination is constantly challenged by people demanding justifications for the exercise of power. The threads of reason are interwoven into the fabric of social life. Ultimately, it is the power of reason that enables people to challenge power. The problem with Habermas's work is that he constantly confused that capacity with existing social arrangements. The classic example was the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, originally published in 1962 (Habermas, 1989a). This book became enormously influential against itself.

Habermas, as is well known, equated the eighteenth-century public sphere with an idealised conception of public reason. So, it had to be a story of decline, with the rise of capitalism and its expansion into the domain of social communication. This was Habermas's attempt to find a solution somewhere between the Dialectic of Enlightenment's narrative of history as a descent into barbarism, and an alternative reading of history that offered scope for hope. He was much criticized for that and for not seeing alternative public spheres, as in the famous book by Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge on the proletarian public sphere (Negt and Kluge, 1993 [1972]).

I recall a conversation with Habermas in 1984 when he discouraged my interest in developing his 1962 theory of the public sphere from the perspective of new social movements, on the grounds that it was out of date. That was before its English translation 27 years later in 1989, which opened up unexpectedly new critical insights. Until then there was only an encylopedia article that appeared in 1974 in New German Critique and was originally published in German in 1964 (Habermas, 1974). It was almost as if Habermas did not welcome the translation of that work, as his theoretical work had moved forward and no longer needed a historical grounding. Despite the apparent contradiction between the public sphere treatise of 1962 and TCA in 1981, the common thread was – and one which continued through his entire work – the concern with critical dialogue as the carrier of reason, and the problems of the resulting tension between reason and rationality. I take it to be an important distinction between Vernunft and Rationalität. The latter is constantly challenged by the former.

By the 1980s, when Habermas had become internationally famous, he realized the mistake of idealizing the historical bourgeois public sphere and making the assumption of a singular public sphere, as opposed to a plurality of public spheres. Undoubtedly his perspectives were broadened by political and intellectual developments in North America and his engagement with prominent US philosophers, including John Rawls and Richard Rorty. The changed circumstances of Western societies in the 1970s with the rise of new social movements gave a new context for the proliferation of a multiplicity of public spheres. This all led to the reinvigorated critical theory in the concluding chapters of TCA on the conflict between system and lifeworld. The theory of communicative action had no need for a theory of modernity that harkened back to the Enlightenment. It provided an inspiring account of the key conflict in contemporary societies that was able to accommodate, on the one side, the Weberian version of the dark thesis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as to the expansion of instrumental rationality, and, on the other, the potentiality for resistance emanating from the lifeworld as it resists ‘colonization’ by the former. It will suffice to mention here that the theory ultimately failed, largely due to its dualism – for example, as famously argued by Axel Honneth of seeing work as only instrumental action. It was blind to the conflicts within the lifeworld – those of gender and ethnicity, for example – as harbouring forms of domination and which cannot be accounted for in terms of the ‘colonization’ of the lifeworld by the system. Habermas later recast the theory of law as justification rather than juridification [Verrechtlichung], with a perspective that made it more central to democracy.

I will mention in passing that there is the irony that his use of the term ‘colonization’ in the final pages of TCA is only metaphorical – intended to capture processes of instrumentalization and reification – and nowhere in his vast work did he discuss actual colonization. He was limited by the horizon of the post-war Federal Republic and the desire to cling onto the European heritage of the Enlightenment, which could resume despite the singularity of the Holocaust. There was no room in it for reflection on European colonization or on ones that were not primarily German (Delanty, 2017).

The problem we have is that in Habermas's work, the concern with normative foundations for critique, grounding reason in real social and historical processes, leads too quickly to finding empirical embodiments. The methodological challenge here is to link the normative grounding of reason without reducing it to what is actual. It may also be the case, as mentioned, that the linchpin of his theory of reason is too thin to understand the nature of conflict and struggle, which is not necessarily always about justification. Many struggles simply do not proceed through justification conceived of in terms of validity claims inherent in the structures of communication. Perhaps that was why Axel Honneth's theory of recognition offered a more robust account of social struggles, even if it restricted struggle to struggles over recognition. The remarkable success of Honneth's book, The Struggle for Recognition, certainly spoke to a major problem with Habermas's resetting of critical social theory (Honneth, 1996 [1992]). While Habermas's account of reason is defensible, in my view, it needs to be complemented with an emphasis on emotions and on the imaginary. Social struggles for a better world draw on reason, emotion and the imaginary. Habermas's breakthrough to a post-metaphysical conception of reason failed to see that social struggles need to be situated in a wider compass.

Nonetheless, I will reiterate that his theory of contemporary societies, as outlined in TCA, while not able to grasp the nature of domination, did not need a theory of the European Enlightenment, due to the formal account of universalistic structures of language, which are not specific to Europe. In my view, one of the lasting contributions of the theory of communicative action was the related idea of historical learning or collective learning processes. Just as individuals learn, societies also learn, even if in different ways. Societies develop in history through ‘learning processes’. The theory of collective learning was one of the great outcomes of the theory of communicative action. It was also the subject of work by Klaus Eder, who was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg during Habermas's directorship in the 1970s (Eder, 1976, 1985, 1999). Societal development is evolutionary in the sense that communicative solutions to problems that were previously solved through violence are found, as in the emergence of constitutionalism and, later, democracy.

By virtue of possessing communicative abilities, people always have the inherent means of contesting power. Giving reasons is not enough, they must be justified. Habermas provided a philosophical basis for justification. He correctly saw social movements as the movers of history, expanding the horizons of communicative action, and in doing so drawing upon and extending the power of reason. Societal learning does not then simply happen on its own or result from changes within statehood, but from social struggles. Social movements constitute the motor of history. Collective learning results from major societal transformation creating, we may say, ‘enlightenment’, or learning outcomes that are carried forward and with, in many cases, universalistic significance. The important point here is that there is nothing specific to Europe about this. Only in recent times has this been appreciated, as for example in Hans Schelkshorn's Rethinking European Modernity (Schelkshorn, 2024). The extent to which the making of institutions that embody reason is more present in Europe is a purely contingent matter. Progress and regression are possible everywhere in the world. Unfortunately, Habermas thought it was a European legacy.

So, I think the ideas of justification and learning were innovative features of his theory of modernity and are not to be confused with modernity per se. For this reason, claiming the end of modernity makes no sense. The formal pragmatic theory of language announced in TCA 1 was developed from arguments in analytical philosophy and the work of C. S. Peirce and others. These perspectives, and other ones in psychology, above all Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of the stages of moral development, established an enduring basis for a conception of critique that was truly universal since it did not rely on culture or history. ³ All human beings, by virtue of their capacity for language and their ability for making moral judgements, are capable of self-problematization, reflection and self-transformation. This was an important and indeed original insight, since it showed how the capacity for transformation is inherent in the human condition, arising from basic linguistic competences. If self-transformation is possible, so too is societal transformation. This perspective demonstrated that transcendence is immanent in the moral and linguistic make-up of societies; it does not come from something beyond society, from a meta-level or anything other than human competences. In my view, this perspective, which of course is just an outcome of deontological ethics, is of lasting significance. It established a firm distinction between criticism and critique, with the latter more transformative and far-reaching in calling into question both self and other. Critique is also a form of world disclosure, a concept originally used by Heidegger but taken up in different ways by later philosophers, including Habermas.

I will not try to answer the pointless question whether Habermas abandoned Marx for Hegel and ended up with Kant. His interlocutors were many, including K.-O. Apel and C.S. Peirce, and others in the North American tradition, such as Talcott Parsons. He began his systemic work as a reconstruction of historical materialism. Johan Arnason once remarked, I recall, that TCA was more of a reconstruction of structural functionalism. Both claims are true, as Volume One was primarily a reconstruction of Marx and Weber, and Volume Two was on Parsons and American traditions of sociological theory. The Kantian strand certainly became more pronounced, but it was a necessary element in his work, providing a foundation for the whole structure of necessity, as in the potentials within human communication for emancipation.

It may have been the case that in rescuing critical theory from the dead end of ideology critique and cultural critique in the manner of Adorno – the paradigm shift from the ‘culture industry’ to the ‘public sphere’ – Habermas may have also killed it. On the one side, as I mentioned, the theory of communicative action was ultimately about justification, with the added dimension of learning, but it was not centrally addressed to conflicts. The later discourse ethics and discourse theory of democracy, as in Between Facts and Norms in 1992, brought critical theory into normative political theory (Habermas, 1996). Habermas's engagement with Rawls's political liberalism was undoubtedly highly productive and he made a lasting contribution to deliberative democracy. As a visiting DAAD doctoral fellow in Frankfurt in 1986/7, I recall a lecture Rawls gave to a large audience as a visiting professor in late 1986, which was introduced and chaired by Habermas. As a reminder of the living tradition of the Frankfurt School another distinguished speaker around about that time was Martin Jay.

As far as critical theory was concerned, Habermas's engagement with Rawls effectively made it irrelevant. Although it was by no means incompatible with critical theory, Habermas's focus shifted to a theory of democracy and its relationship to the constitutional state and pluralism (Habermas, 1998). The differences between the position he ended up with and that of Rawls were relatively minor, both intellectually and politically. ⁴ Rawls's Theory of Justice was the most important work in political theory in the twentieth century. Its publication in 1971 totally transformed political theory in a way that had no comparable parallel in social theory. TCA did not have that revolutionary impact, though perhaps for a time Parsons did do something similar to that which Rawls did for political theory. It is interesting to ponder why Habermas devoted so much energy to both Parsons and Rawls. The latter's influence never waned, unlike that of Parsons. It remains to be seen if that will be said about Habermas. Probably not, as Rawls was concerned with one central problem, the problem of distributive justice, while Habermas was preoccupied with many problems.

Undoubtedly his legacy will also be shaped by his de facto abandonment of sociology for philosophy, even if he did not see it like that. While the turn to political theory led to new insights, there were also lost opportunities. Unlike, for example, the immense impact that Foucault had on social science, Habermas's impact was negligible as far as social research – as opposed to debates in social theory and the philosophy of social science – was concerned. ⁵ One recalls his seminal contribution to the collective volume entitled The Positivist Dispute in German Philosophy, based on a conference in 1961 and a later methodological work in 1967, but after 1981 the engagement with sociology receded (Adorno et al., 1976 [1969]; Habermas 1989b). I also wonder if the defence of ‘post-metaphysical thinking’ – as in his book of that title – was really innovative and not just a statement on what philosophy had become (Habermas, 1992). It certainly did not clarify what it meant for critical theory.

From its beginning, critical theory was an attempt to bring sociology and philosophy together. This was Max Horkheimer's project in the 1930s, and it was a characteristic feature of the old critical theory until well into the 1970s. Habermas was in this tradition when he was appointed to Horkheimer's chair of Philosophy and Sociology in 1964 at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and gave his inaugural address the following year (Müller-Doohm, 2016: 124). As Director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg from 1971, he presided over social research programmes that incorporated critical theory, as in Legitimation Crisis, one of the most interesting sociological works of that period and part of what was ‘the reconstruction of historical materialism’ (Habermas, 1975a, 1975b).

It does need to be considered that, in the first half of the twentieth century, the relatively new social science of sociology was undeveloped, and it was generally regarded since Weber that it needed to be separated from philosophy to allow for its autonomous development. For critical theory since the foundation of the Institute of Social Research, the challenge was to retain a critical purpose, and so it needed the relationship with philosophy. However, by the late twentieth century, philosophy and sociology went in different directions, the former towards analytical philosophy and the latter towards empirical social research. Habermas clearly saw his project as the advancement of a conception of democracy that retained a link with critique. In that endeavour his version of deliberative democracy was different from that of Rawls, which lacked the more transformative edge that Habermas's late work retained. However, it was at the cost of losing the link with sociology, which was to the detriment of critical theory, which subsequently lost its direction. It must be noted that Habermas's work had considerable influence in empirical studies of deliberative democracy, as illustrated in the work of John Dryzek (2000) and others. However, within sociology, which is an empirical discipline, critical theory did not have much influence in social research. In the teaching of sociology, critical theory is mostly part of social theory.

At about this time, the early 1990s, the thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld collapsed, effectively marking the end of Habermas's active engagement with sociological problems. Henceforth, the question of social struggles receded from his horizon and the preoccupation with the democratic constitutional state became the focus. I will comment here all too briefly that the retreat of critical theory into political theory is not to be blamed on Habermas – who made a significant contribution until at least the early 1980s – or on philosophers taking it over as it were, but on sociology, for not taking it forward (and relegating it to ‘social theory’, as a body of classical texts). To his credit, Habermas did after all return to the theory of the public sphere in a late work, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (Habermas, 2023).

Related to the shift from social theory to political theory was his growing interest in European integration. His many writings on European political community since the 1990s constitute an important body of work on the possibly of a European post-national community. My first book, Inventing Europe in 1995 drew on his notion of a post-national polity as the only alternative to cultural conceptions of European identity (Delanty, 1995, also 2018). Habermas was in a way the political philosopher of the European Union and strongly defended a conception of a European polity grounded on the values of justice, democracy, constitutionalism and human rights. This perspective was contrary to the way the EU was consolidating into a technocratic order of governance, possessing many of the characteristics of a state without the moorings of democracy and civil society.

Habermas's writings consistently defended the need for a foundation in democratic constitutionalism and drew on Kant's notion of a cosmopolitan transformation of international law, as well as Kant's aspiration to bring about a republican order of European states. In this way, he stood for an alternative conception of political community from that of national community. Until the end, in various essays and collections, he argued for the strengthening of the EU in an increasingly dangerous world. A later work Ach Europa [Oh Europe] – in English, The Faltering Project (2009) – conveyed a strong sense of disappointment with the course of European integration as a project of governmental integration and its failure to bring the people of Europe together (Habermas, 2009). That was before the calamity of Brexit. A few weeks after the referendum in 2016 in an interview he commented: ‘It never occurred to me that populism would defeat capitalism in its country of birth’. ⁶ In these collections of political writings, including the seminal Postnational Constellation, his observations were very sharp and displayed considerable acumen in understanding the legal and institutional logic of European integration and its various and increasing crises (Habermas, 2001 [1998], 2012).

Though his focus was on Europe, he believed in the idea of the West and was strongly North American in his horizon. He also seemed to hold onto the illusion that it seems now necessary to question, that Europe and the USA constitute a shared political community. I have argued and continue to hold to the position that Europe has been for some time post-Western. The Iraq War revealed a serious rupture, as Habermas was only too aware (Habermas, 2006 [2004]). His influential joint statement with Jacques Derrida, an unlikely co-author for him, against the Iraq War in 2003, entitled ‘February 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe’, was a great testimony to the public relevance of philosophy; although not everyone was taken by the notion of a ‘core Europe’ (Habermas and Derrida, 2003).

It would be tempting to regard Habermas as a cosmopolitan thinker. The political philosophy he espoused was essentially republicanism, and it was through that lens that he invoked cosmopolitanism, which was based on Kant's cosmopolitanization of international law. Indirectly, however, his work was very important for what I have called critical cosmopolitanism (I am not the only author to use the term). Habermas's dialogic concept of political community and the broader context of critical theory suggested, at least to me, a way to lead cosmopolitan social and political theory in a more fruitful direction from the restrictive version found in liberal political theory and its Kantian variants. As I tried to show in my book The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Theory, Habermas's ‘critical hermeneutics’ suggested a dialogic conception of cosmopolitanism more relevant to social and cultural theory (Delanty, 2009). I also argued that it offered a way to rescue critical theory from its very Eurocentric background and the absence of any perspective on globalization.

One of the major limitations of critical theory and Habermas's work was that it remained too concerned with the historical experience of Nazism and the German collective guilt complex. Habermas, as I mentioned, had made an attempt to address the wider context of the 1970s, and while he made a valid intervention in the 1980s German Historikerstreit, in the end (Habermas, 1989 [1985/1987], 1989a [1962], 1989b) he seemed to be unnecessarily confined by the problem of German collective war guilt and, for an international readership, had little or nothing to say about other historical experiences, such as those of the ‘Global South’. If critical theory is to be relevant today, it must move beyond its Northern hemisphere confines and, above all, the German burden of history. Perhaps it also needs to be focussed more on the future than on the past, as I argued in my book Senses of the Future (Delanty, 2024). Habermas's abiding concern with the possibility of hope for the future does offer a basis for such a perspective on future possibility and that human beings are not limited by historical experience.

Despite his growing role as the preeminent political philosopher of the EU, Habermas was a very prominent figure in the German public culture. The two roles were not harmonious, since Habermas always spoke from the German context and its burdens. His presence as a public intellectual in the German public sphere began in the late 1960s with the student movement and the reform of German higher education (see Habermas, 1970 [1961]), and it continued with German unification in 1990. Habermas's public role was then very much that of a left-wing intellectual, but something changed in the last decade or so of his life, when he became a more conservative figure.

By the time of his death, after a long and well lived life, as documented by Stefan Müller-Doohm (2016), he had become something of a state philosopher. His first response, ‘Ein Plädoyer für Verhandlungen’ in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (February 15, 2023), to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was disappointing, making as he did an uncritical plea for peace, which effectively was a demand for Ukraine to surrender. A later article, ‘Von hier an müssen wir alleine weitergehen’, also published in the SZ (November 21, 2025), was more satisfying, in its calling for European unity, but clearly he had no strong perspective on a war that has fundamentally changed the current situation, with the end of the era of post-1945 stability, and the pressing need for Europe to defend itself against Russia. His critical voice lost its impetus, and he remained silent on the increasing authoritarian turn in German public culture, quite a contrast to his earlier support for anti-authoritarianism in education and politics in the 1970s.

Habermas's strong support for Israel took on a reactionary character, especially with the now notorious ‘Solidary Statement’ published following the barbaric attack on an Israeli kibbutz on 9^th October 2023. ⁷ One would expect some empathy, if not solidarity, with the plight of the people of Gaza being murdered by the Israeli military, and some questioning of Israel's military operation, as well as the historical background that has led to the current situation, for which Israel is responsible. But what we got was an anodyne statement for solidarity only for Israel and a rejection that genocide comes into the picture. This was an astonishing position to hold, for its limited notion of solidarity, and a grave error of judgement, especially in light of worldwide condemnation of what is now widely accepted to be genocide (see Streeck, 2025, 2026). The statement reveals that Habermas's own understanding of critique had a selective application.

So, in the end his universalism was underpinned by a particularism. As regards ‘the unforced force of the better argument’, Habermas did not reply to the criticisms of his position. It may quite well be the case that he wanted to preserve his position within the official public culture in Germany, which requires accepting the doctrine of Staatsräson, a fundamental and non-negotiable commitment to Israel's security regardless of any consequences. Aside from being almost certainly unconstitutional, this position is not compatible with the conception of political community that Habermas had defended against conservative attacks.

Habermas's later work, despite the exceptional scholarship and unquestionable value for deliberative democratic theory, lacked engagement with pressing political problems and social struggles. His final major work was on religion (Habermas, 2023/2024/2025 [2019]). Habermas's life work was shaped by the post-war decades of reconstruction and the establishment of a Western normative international order. Those were times of relative peace and stability, and they are now gone. His strong Europeanism too was part of that age which is now over, with a new and uncertain one beginning. For our time, his work lacked a sense of urgency, with its belief in the openness of communication and the view that the future will be better than the past and present. Similar things were said of Kant and Hegel, about how they misunderstood their times, and yet we still go back to them. Perhaps this will be the case with Habermas, who will doubtlessly join the pantheon of great European philosophers. His legacy for sociology is less clear but guaranteed at least for social theory.