Hölderlin referred to Germany as the “priestless, God’s quietest daughter”, from which flowed an “abundance of golden words into the rivers” which then “issue forth into all the localities”. For a long time now, this flow into the rest of Europe has dried up. German writers, philosophers, and thinkers have ceased to nourish those rivers, perhaps also as a reflection of a political situation that appears without exit and portends an even deeper darkness.
The German question must once again (now as always) be addressed as the core of the European question. What is certain is that, with the passing of Jürgen Habermas, the spiritual condition of Germany is gravely impoverished. Habermas was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, but also the last representative of a generation (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl-Otto Apel, Dieter Henrich, Ernst Tugendhat, Michael Theunissen and others) that, in the postwar period, sought to preserve the best of Germany’s speculative and intellectual tradition while combining it with contributions and approaches coming largely, though not exclusively, from across the Atlantic.
Awareness of this necessity emerged in the young Habermas not only through his fierce intellectual confrontation with Martin Heidegger, whose intrinsic compromise with Nazism he grasped well before the Black Notebooks revealed it even to the wilfully blind, but also through his reconstruction of German intellectual history in the monumental doctoral dissertation submitted in 1954 at the University of Bonn (Das Absolute und die Geschichte: von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken – The Absolute and History: On the Ambivalence in Schelling’s Thought). In this work, by investigating the reasons for Schelling’s turn to the “philosophy of revelation”, Habermas reconnects, alongside Lukács and Löwith, with the phase that prepared the democratic revolution of 1848 in Germany. There is also a speculative reason, Habermas seems to suggest, for the failure of that democratic revolution: Schelling, Kierkegaard and the Hegelian Left all projected themselves towards the openness and creativity of historical existence, only to imprison it once again within an absolute, metaphysically closed foundation. This Zwiespältigkeit, this division and tension between the Absolute and history, remained the key to Germany’s spiritual experience up to Heidegger, passing through neo-Kantianism, historicism and phenomenology. More than that, it is the key to understanding the history of a country which, from Bismarck onwards, rode the wave of capitalist modernisation, absorbing the novum while nonetheless enclosing it within archaic and immobile institutional and cultural structures (the Empire, the Junkers, reactionary mythologies).
Marx (the only genuine alternative, for this Habermas, to the tension between Absolute and history) did not entirely dissolve it either, though not due to metaphysical or idealist abstraction but, rather, to an excess of materialist reduction. Such reduction, Habermas argued, failed to grasp the processes of neutralisation and depoliticisation that the young radical sociologist identified in the Federal Republic in Student und Politik (Students and Politics 1958). The curse of the failed democratic revolution of 1848 thus reappeared, albeit in radically new terms: democracy now succumbed not, as during the Weimar Republic, through confrontation with unleashed fascist forces, but through accommodation to the late-capitalist manipulation of the “public sphere”. This is the theme of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), from which emerges the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis of a democracy originally nourished by the rich fabric of an emerging civil society (clubs, newspapers, cafés, etc.), but subsequently undermined by both the monopolistic concentration of media and, with the genesis of the welfare state, the statification of economic life.
The shadows of Heidegger and of Carl Schmitt, whose influence is palpable in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, returned to haunt Habermas: was there no longer any exit from the technocratic planning of existence, from the “total” state, even after the fall of Nazism? No, because, within the original research programme of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which Habermas joined officially as an assistant in 1956, there existed not only the tendencies that would culminate in the partly irrationalist catastrophism of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). That programme also contained the project of reconstructing a materialist theory of knowledge capable of reconnecting description with prescription, science with emancipation and liberation. To realise this possibility, however, it was necessary to refound a theory of reason that would both provide the philosophical grounding lacking in the Hegelian Left and Marx, and dismantle the positivism that, having penetrated the normative self-understanding of the natural sciences, prevented them from placing their technical potential at the disposal of society as a whole, leaving it instead in the hands of capital.
It is at this conjuncture, with Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), that the decisive turning-point in Habermas’s work is fixed. If, as this book argues, everything depends on the rebirth of philosophical reflection capable of penetrating the sciences, the principal productive force of the present, and redirecting them towards democratic socialisation (what Marx called the relations of production), and if such reflection, in turn, depends on renewed collective self-clarification through revolutionary organisation and individual self-clarification through psychoanalysis, what happens when both revolutionary organisation and psychoanalysis enter into crisis? Habermas’s answer in the 1970s was clear: the Marxian unity between productive forces and relations of production (the relation between labour and interaction that had governed human evolution thus far) itself enters into crisis. Historical materialism, at least in its traditional form, reaches its end.
From this separation between democracy and capitalism flowed one major theoretical consequence and several practical-political ones. The theoretical consequence, which occupied Habermas throughout the 1970s until the publication of his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), was the need, now that historical materialism had been set aside, for a new justification not only of humanity’s historical-evolutionary trajectory, now grounded in Weberian theorems of rationalisation, but also of democracy as a normative practice of “giving and asking for reasons”.
Thus emerged a theory of “communicative action”, distinguished from “strategic action”, which is oriented towards success and the manipulation of others. Communicative action, by contrast, is oriented towards “mutual understanding” through language. Not language immersed in propaganda, rhetoric or relations of force, but language employed under conditions of equality, symmetry and the absence of coercion, enabling participants to raise validity claims to propositional truth (linked to science), rightness (linked to morality) and sincerity (linked to art). Since every validity claim depends on the acceptance of others (and, counterfactually, on the hypothetical acceptance that all human beings could grant were they properly convened) it is always revisable and provisional. Truth is thus stripped of metaphysical or idealist vestiges and becomes fallibilistically dependent on rational acceptability. Yet, if truth is only justification and rational acceptability, what is the status of the claim that asserts this very conception of truth? Here, Karl-Otto Apel’s objections, invoking a Letztbegründung (ultimate justification), remain, in our view, pertinent.
The practical-political consequences of the separation between democracy and capitalism were no less significant. Habermas, who, until 1968, had pushed forward the emancipatory process within a deeply conservative German context, found himself, once detached from Marxism, without a platform from which to engage with the movement. Hence the absurd polemical overtone of his critique of the student movement (“left fascism”) and his subsequent denial of the objective character of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. This prevented him, in a certain sense up to the present, from grasping the immanent roots of the resurgence of the right and far right within advanced capitalist societies. To be sure, especially between the late 1970s and early 1990s, Habermas constituted a powerful barrier against both old and new conservatisms (from his polemic against Ernst Nolte’s historical revisionism to his critiques of poststructuralism). Yet the impetus towards deepening emancipation progressively weakened, even if one may recall his fine collection Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit (The New Obscurity, 1985), where the theory of communicative action was deployed to understand the “new social movements” and to reject the productivist and industrialist nostalgias of social democracy.
The question of democracy nonetheless remained unresolved, since Habermas’s last systematic diagnosis had been that of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The result of his later reworking was Between Facts and Norms (1992), a work of great conceptual complexity and notable insights, such as the co-originality of popular sovereignty and human rights, even when, in our view, it is clearly marked by its poverty of outcomes. The upheavals produced by capitalist globalisation, with the emergence of crises of political authority and of the state that persist to the present, are largely set aside, in the hope that law might continue to function as a reliable mediator between lifeworld and system, and that formal deliberative institutions might be elitistically lubricated by technocratic expertise until a broader crisis necessitated the reactivation of ordinary democratic channels, from citizenship and public opinion to the state itself.
Habermas later lamented that he had not addressed the formation of institutions of transnational democracy (such as the European Union). Yet the problems (starting with war and the intensification of interimperialist conflict) were far more severe, and, in confronting them, Habermas did not display the necessary acumen. Not only in enthusiastic legitimising of interventions outside international law (such as NATO’s bombing of Serbia), but also in failing fully to grasp the historical-materialist reasons, rooted in intercapitalist competition, for the present division of the West across the Atlantic.
Habermas, undoubtedly, embodied the aspirations for a federal Europe of decentralised sovereignty, at times taking just and necessary positions (such as his critique of the financial strangulation of Greece in 2015), at others refraining from fully confronting the degree of the EU’s own involvement in imperialist operations (in Eastern Europe or the Middle East). Most recently, these serious limitations became evident at the end of 2023, when Habermas signed a letter (with Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst and Klaus Günther) in support of Israel’s “right to exist”, denying that the Palestinians, then and now victims of brutal “retaliation”, possessed that right as well. Yet his errors and even his blind spots do not diminish his intellectual stature. Without him, the darkness deepens still further in a Germany and a Europe that appear increasingly adrift.
Giorgio Cesarale teaches at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and is a Corresponding Editor of Historical Materialism.
