By the time he died this past Saturday at age ninety-six, Jürgen Habermas had become something of a reviled figure for much of the Left. His liberalism, centered on a belief in communicative rationality, was perceived as an abandonment of the more radical impulses of the Frankfurt School — Sam Moyn, for example, wrote that Habermas’s “global philosophical legacy was to accede to the end of history, in various ways, with consequences that critical theory hasn’t recovered from.” But the animosity toward him was sharpened by the statement that he and several of his colleagues at Frankfurt University produced in November 2023, which criticized the attribution of “genocidal intentions” to Israel.
Centrists have generally been more positive about Habermas’s legacy, though in the last few years some of them have also been willing to trash him — not so much for his position on the genocide in Gaza as for his position on the war in Ukraine. For those who insisted that the war could only end with Russia’s defeat and who wanted Germany to provide Ukraine with more weapons, Habermas’s two interventions in the Süddeutsche Zeitung — one in 2022 in which he criticized the new hawkishness of German elites and another in 2023 in which he called for negotiations to end the war — were enough to completely discredit the nonagenarian philosopher.
However, for many centrists and even some on the Left, especially perhaps in the United States, one aspect of Habermas’s thought that redeems him at least somewhat is his “pro-Europeanism.” More than perhaps anyone, Habermas gave an intellectual basis to the idea of the European Union as a progressive project, though “pro-Europeans” tend to overlook how critical he was of the really existing EU even as he continued to believe it was necessary and possible to transform it. Yet Habermas’s commitment to the EU, even as it diverged further and further from the cosmopolitan project of his imagination,…
Auteur: Hans Kundnani
