Thomas Gregersen has a blog about Habermas and the liberal political philosopher John Rawls, and he has complied a long list of Habermas obituary links, many but not all in German. He includes pieces by the current German President Frank Walter Steinmeier, French President Emmanuel Macron, former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, and UN General Secretary António Guterres. (2)
For Americans, let’s pause just a moment to try to imagine President Donald Trump writing an informed obituary for a political philosopher who wrote books like The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of Communicative Action, and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. It would come out something like: “Yes, a German guy named Habermas just died. I don’t know much about him, but I heard he suffered from Trump derangement syndrome and was a very low IQ guy.”
Others in Gregersen’s list of Habermas obituary authors include: Eric Alterman, Seyla Benhabib, Micha Brumlik, Rainer Forst, Nancy Fraser, Norbert Frei, Axel Honneth, Martin Jay, Alexander Kluge, Robert Misik, Jan-Werner Müller, Herfried Münkler, Raimund Löw, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Piketty.
Habermas and democracy
The eminent legal scholar Cass Sunstein did an obituary reflection on Habermas' work on his Substack. He writes:
Jurgen Habermas is one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century; he has been preoccupied for much of his life with the problem of political legitimacy. Under what circumstances is it legitimate for political authorities, mere human beings, to exercise power over other human beings? It is unsurprising that a German philosopher - in his teens during the Nazi period and a witness to countless other atrocities since - should direct his attention to this question. Mr. Habermas thinks that the question is especially urgent in an era that is “postmetaphysical,” in the sense that it has lost the sense that we have wholly external foundations by which to ground our judgments and choices. Whether or not we believe that God exists, it seems clear that as citizens in a heterogeneous society we must proceed on the understanding that our choices are our own. But even as he insists on this point, Mr. Habermas draws a line against modern irrationalists, many of them - like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida - influential within the modern academy. Mr. Habermas says, tellingly, that those who oppose reason and the Enlightenment can give no account of the basis for their own rhetoric, which seems inspired by the Enlightenment commitment to human liberation. [my emphasis] (3)Habermas wrote a lot about the philosophy of law. He stressed the connection between democracy and the rule of law, i.e., each is essential to the other. The rule of law in democratic theory means not only that the laws apply to everyone equally but also that the laws are legitimate only when there is valid democratic representation in their making. And likewise the laws are essential to establishing and maintain democracy. The Trump and Orbáns of the world want to do away with both, because democracy and the rule of law are inextricably intertwined concepts and systems of governance. His work fits into the field of “critical legal studies.”
Habermas and history
Habermas was often called Germany’s most famous philosopher during the last several decades, and that’s likely true. He was a prolific writer and often addressed current political concerns. He was even famous enough that his name has its own adjective, “Habermasian.” He is rightly given credit for initiating the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) of the 1980s, a dispute over attempts be rightwing historians to minimize the significance of the Holocaust. Briefly put, the dispute initially was over a claim by a rightwing historian that actually Joe Stalin and the Soviet Communists were responsible for the Holocaust. Yes, that argument was as crackpot as it sounded. And now, you were pretty much have to seek out people with Nazi tattoos to find someone making that same claim.
But a lasting feature of that controversy was a new focus for both scholars and politicians on the most sensible and appropriate ways to compare the Holocaust in particular with other historical events. Genocide scholar Omer Bartov, who was one of the many genocide scholars who called out the Netanyahu government’s acts of genocide in the 1923-2026 (and continuing) Gaza War, wrote a retrospective piece on the Historikerstreit, in which he describes the implications for politics and history of that dispute. (4) When present-day figures like TechBro oligarch Elon Musk or our Opus Dei Vice President (and Viktor Orbán fan) J.D. Vance tell Germans it’s time for them to get over all this here reflecting on the evils of Nazism, you’re hearing similar themes to those promoted by de facto Nazi apologists during the Historikerstreit.
The Frankfurt School and Politics
Habermas was the most famous figure of what is called the Second Generation of the Frankfurt School. It actually had and still has its own academic institution, the Institute for Social Research. This is the description of some of its leading figures from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Some of the most prominent figures of the first generation of Critical Theorists were Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993), and Eric Fromm (1900-1980). Since the 1970s, a second generation began with Jürgen Habermas, who, among other merits, contributed to the opening of a dialogue between so-called continental and the analytic traditions. With Habermas, the Frankfurt School turned global, influencing methodological approaches in other European academic contexts and disciplines. It was during this phase that Richard Bernstein, a philosopher and contemporary of Habermas, embraced the research agenda of Critical Theory and significantly helped its development in American universities starting from the New School for Social Research in New York. (5)The Frankfurt School is often described, accurately enough, as working on social theory with particular emphasis on the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber. The became especially known for their sociological studies on the “authoritarian personality” to try to understand the social and psychological characteristics of people who are attracted to authoritarian movements, including work in the United States directed by Max Horkheimer known as the Studies in Prejudice series. Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse later started using the term Critical Theory for their perspective, a label that has endured for a while, i.e., since 1937. (6)
During the first six decades of the 20th century, there were two dominant schools of left theory in European politics, most notably those associated with the Social Democratic Parties and the Soviet-line Communist Parties. Pretty much since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, those two broad schools of thought and politics considered themselves Marxist socialists. The polemics between the Social Democrats and Communists over who represented the true and pure version of Marxism and socialism. Although not nearly as significant as those two in actual political participation, Trotskyism was a split-off from Communist that also considered itself Marxist and socialist (and Communist) that has influenced a lot of historical accounts in particular. Not having much actual political power after Trotsky left the Soviet Union, Trotskyists became famous for their hair-splitting polemics against other who claimed to be Marxists. The best working definition I’ve ever heard of that trend is: Trotskyists are the people who support revolutions everywhere except where there is one going on. Actual revolutions are never pure enough for them.
It was disputes like that over the purest version of Marxism that promoted Karl Marx himself to write to his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels that he was happy that “I, at least, am not a Marxist.”
That context is important for the Frankfurt School’s history. Their political positioning was more-or-less militant left social-democracy, though their militance was more intellectual and theoretical. They didn’t personally play major roles in political parties and didn’t plot sabotage attacks against arms manufacturers, or whatever. But they were very concerned with politics and were generally committed to a Marxist model of social revolution that was not focused on promoting violent uprisings but was also not pacifist.
Skipping over a few rabbit-holes that could be explored here, it’s also notable that another well-known Frankfurt School adherent, legal theorist Franz Neumann, who authored on of the best early studies of the German Nazi system, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944 (1944). Neumann came to the United States and worked for the US Board of Economic Warfare and the Intelligence Division of the US Chief of Staff, joining the now-legendary Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the major predecessor organization of the CIA. Herbert Marcuse was one of the analysts he brought to work in the OSS, and Marcuse later worked with the State Department Intelligence.
After Marcuse became an icon of the “student revolution” in the 1960s, he was wrongly reported to have worked for the CIA, which he didn’t. Tim Müller wrote a detailed account of Marcuse's intelligence career, Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg. (7) It was a chronic problem for US intelligence during the 1950s that they wanted and needed good intelligence information on the Communist world. But the atmosphere of the McCarthy period made anyone who was extremely familiar with Marxism almost automatically suspicious. That lack of expertise contributed significantly to misunderstanding of events in Vietnam and even of the Soviet-China splits, which actually began in the mid-1950s but wasn’t understood by US intelligence dominated by an assumption of a World Communist Conspiracy centered in Moscow. Müller observes that Marcuse’s 1958 book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis was reflective of the kind of intelligence evaluations he provided to the State Department. Among other things, he rightly predicted that a post-Stalin Soviet Union would likely be opening to moving to a position of peaceful coexistence with the US. Something that the State Department was reluctant to believe given its ideological assumptions about Soviet Communism.
Habermas and Politics
That was the political and philosophical environment of the school of thought in which Habermas was educated and which he himself developed further. As part of the Frankfurt School tradition, he identified with the left of the German Social Democratic Party of the 1960s, which had in 1959 adopted what was called the Godesberg Program, which adopted reform proposals that retreated from such classical Marxist goals as the eventual nationalizing of the means of production. The left of the party and later the larger student movement viewed it as a conservative capitulation to the right and an abandonment of desirable ideals.
Habermas had a particular vision of radical democratization that focused on encouraging broad engagement by ordinary citizens. But he also rejected what he saw as something like disruption for the sake of disruption by student activists. Because he wanted to promote grassroots dialogue and real discussion among ordinary citizens, not disruption in the hope that it would produce some kind of radical social transformation for the better. But that didn’t mean he was shy about debating. On the contrary. He saw sharp and intense arguments as necessary processes in a dialectical process of democratization. In one argument that became famous, he accused radical students of “left fascism” for some of their approaches to confrontation. But he took the mobilization of students in The Sixties and their increased engagement in political action as basically a healthy sign for democracy, which he articulated in his books on Structural Transformation and Communicative Action.
Habermas and another 2nd generation Frankfurt School figure, Claus Offe, publicized the concept of “late capitalism” to characterize the period from 1970 or so on with its new priorities like grappling with ecological challenges, in which the “legitimation problems” of capitalist democracies appeared to be growing.
One of the stranger rightwing crackpot theories of recent decades is one that starts from the authoritarian right’s resentment of Horkheimer’s Studies in Prejudice series. It goes like this: The Frankfurt School was a group of German Jewish Marxists who begat Postmodernism which begat Political Correctness which begot Critical Race Theory which begat Wokeism. Far right stars like Christopher Rufo have pimped this silly narrative.
Because it refers to things that most rightwing podcast fans are never going to read, most of them won’t know or care that this is vapid nonsense. The Frankfurt School figures were Marxists, or at least significantly influenced by Marxism. Marxism is a theory based on a materialist philosophical outlook and a materialist theory of history. Postmodernism is “a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” (8)
Quick Check: Frankfurt School thought is based or “broad skepticism”? In the philosophical sense, no, although Critical Theory relies on, well, critical analysis which involves methodological skepticism. Subjectivism? Well, their Freudian perspective does recognize that people are motivated by subjective feelings and impressions, but assumes they are based on material processes, both individual and social. Relativism? “Relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.” (9) Nope, that’s not Frankfurt School. Critical Theory. either. Sensitivity to ideology in power relations? Well, yes, but not in the reductionist and rather fuzzy-headed way postmodernism approaches it. Also, good grief? How could any social theory of politics ignore the role of ideology? General suspicion of reason? Not even close to a fit. Habermas warned in a 2006 essay, “A ‘post-truth democracy’, such as the New York Times saw on the horizon during the last Presidential elections [of 2004], would no longer be a democracy” - another sharp difference from the postmodern conceptions. (10)
Habermas’ book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity takes a highly critical view of tthe postmodernists’ approach. In it he writes, “Postmodernism is characterized by the withering away of every form of unifying, principle-led interpretation of the world; it carries the anarchistic features of a polycentric world that has lost its previous categorical differentiations.” (11)
Crackpot theories are par for the course on the radical right. But that bizarre theory is just goofy.
Habermas is also known for promoting the concept of constitutional patriotism, which originated with Dolf Sternberger, a conservative thinker, in 1979. Habermas expanded this concept and held it up as a constructive alternative to the traditional patriotism founded on a more narrow nationalism. Which also fit well with his enthusiastic advocacy for the European Union and a post-national project.
He was a member of the publishing board of the German journal on politics and history Blätter für deutsche und international Politik from 1998 until his passing. The April 2026 issue of Blätter includes an obituary essay for him titled “World Spirit on Paper” by Hauke Brunkhorst – a play on Hegel’s famous description of Napoleon as the World Spirit on a Horse, after seeing himself ride through Hegel’s then city of residence, Jena. (12)
Habermas and Religion
Habermas’ last major work, published in 2019, was a large (over 1700 pages) two-volume work about the relationship of religion and philosophy in Western philosophy. It deals with the interaction of the two ways of viewing the world, such as his analysis of the evolution of the concept of universal human rights from that of John Locke’s religion-based concept of natural law to the secularized social forms it took with David Hume and Emmanuel Kant.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a long article on Habermas by James Godron Finlayson and Dafydd Huw Rees.
This is a German-language retrospective on Habermas and his impact: (13)
Notes:
(1) Stefan Dege & Stuart Braun (2026): Deutsche Welle 03/14/2026. https://www.dw.com/en/celebrated-philosopher-j%C3%BCrgen-habermas-dies-aged-96/a-76361563> (Accessed: 2026-10-04).
(2) Jürgen Habermas 1929–2026: Obituaries and Tributes. Political Theory - Habermas and Rawls, 03/14/2026. https://habermas-rawls.blogspot.com/2026/03/habermas-dies-at-age-96.html (Accessed: 2026-10-04).
(3) Sunstein, Cass (2024): On the Death of Jurgen Habermas: A Day to Mourn, A Hero to Celebrate. Cass’s Substack 03/14/2026. <https://casssunstein.substack.com/p/on-the-death-of-jurgen-habermas> (Accessed: 2026-10-04).
(4) Bartov, Omer (1992): Time Present and Time Past: The Historikerstreit and German Reunification. New German Critique 55, 173-190. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/488296?seq=1>
(5) Corradetti, Claudio (2026): The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. <https://iep.utm.edu/critical-theory-frankfurt-school/> (Accessed: 2026-11-04).
(6) Horkheimer, Max (1937): Traditionelle und kritische Theorie. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung Jahrgang 6, 245-294.
Horkheimer, Max & Marcuse, Herbert: (1937): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung Jahrgang 6, 625-647.
(7) Müller, Tim M. (2010): Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.
(8) Duignan, Brian (2026): "postmodernism". Encyclopedia Britannica 03/26/2026, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy> (Accessed 2026-11-04).
(9) Maria Baghramian and J. Adam Carter: Relativism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 01/10/2025. <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/> (Accessed 2026-11-04).
(10) Habermas, Jürgen (2006): Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philosophy 14:1, 18.
(11) Habermas, Jürgen (1988): Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen. Chapter VI.II. Frankfurt am Main. My translation into English.
(12) Brunkhorst, Hauke (2026): Weltgeist auf Papier. Zum Tode von Jürgen Habermas. Blätter 4:2026, 49-58.
(13) Habermas - Ein europäischer Vordenker. Irgendwas mit ARTE und Kultur YouTube channel 03/16/2026. <https://youtu.be/5_9JJJjIAFc?si=i4Vn2F3zIq7C1CFn> (Accessed 2026-12-04).
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