Major, major rabbit hole warning. You think you're about to read something about a philosophy professor, and what you get is an Alice Munro/Larry McMurtry mashup. His son seems to be a pretty amazing writer in his own right.
In a time in which Democracies are being threatened by authoritarians governments, such a loss is a reminder Democracy is not guarantee, you have to fight for it, every single day.
Habermas was truly a giant. Regardless of your political outlook, some engagement with his texts is time well spent. For an accessible on-ramp to his work, I recommend:
Perhaps the missing component is that not only is rationality communicable, but so is irrationally.
The memetic material out there has had an incredible and tumultuous era of rapid evolution. Theres been such radical pressure to get better at consuming our attention, at trying to get ideas to spread. The means have perhaps outstripped the Humana ability to communicate & make sense of so much highly weaponized memetic systems.
I like Luhmann’s theory better. What i like about it is that Luhmann argues that the smallest denominator of a social system is a realation between two. Habermas says it can be brought down to an individual. Which in my mind defeats the “social” part.
Havin not read the underlying theory, is the society of one constructed with the belief that one has relations to one's self?
That is, I could see that the idea of a society of two could be derived from a society of one in that I could extend my desire to be kind to my past, present, and future selves, to a desire to be kind to selves that are not my own.
Kind of like a computing network being a generalisation of the network that exists inside anyone one machine in that networking is just i/o with more steps and more wire?
He regularly wrote essays for "Süddeutsche Zeitung", commenting on the world's political situation. The last one I read was published in November 2025. Sharp as a knive, as always. I'll miss them.
I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories. But it looks like he was explicitly critical of postmodernism and other counter-enlightenment movements.
The Frankfurter Schule was politically conservative, the "leftism" of present-day identity politics is a rehash of radical 1970s Maoism that simply coopts the Frankfurter Schule lexicon in agitating for a new "Great Cultural Revolution" throughout the West, consequences be damned. This is the "counter-enlightenment" part: the Maoist "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" saw Enlightenment values as reflecting "bourgeois privilege", and identity politics has wholly inherited this point of view. Frankfurter Schule members would have disagreed quite sharply with that position, their outlook was defined by a whole lot of nuance.
"Frankfurt School Critical Theory" went through several generations with different commitments and each of those generations was quite politically and theoretically diverse.
The only true statements that hold for all writers at all times are largely uninteresting.
What can be said with confidence is that Frankfurt School theorists were not "counter-enlightenment".
Adorno and Horkheimer were explicitly trying to explain why the ideal of the enlightenment - greater rationality in social and political affairs and a fuller realization of individual moral autonomy - had not been achieved in their time. They saw themselves, rightly, as more faithful heirs to the tradition in their attempt to "rescue" it than those who insisted it did not require rescue. You may disagree - many within the tradition of critical theory have - but I don't think readings of their texts which see them as "counter-enlightement" can be sustained.
"I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories."
With all due respect, this sentence betrays a complete unfamiliarity with "postmodernism", "the long march through the institutions", and "identity politics". It wildly anachronistic to conflate these. It makes about as much sense as saying that Mitterand was an Avignon pope.
It is called „ Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School“ and analysis Karp‘s PhD thesis. Which, even though he didnt write it under Habermas supervision, was highly influenced by the Frankfurt school (Adorno et al).
The author also provides some thoughts on your question. The connection between Critical Theory and Trumpism
Very much so, I hold this view as someone who reads a bit of Critical Theory; Catherine Liu recently makes a case for this as well as disparate other public intellectuals from Chomsky to Zizek have also generally critiqued CT academics, postmodernists, etc. The basic argument is something like, Frankfurt School itself had a tension over their primary text (Dialectic of Enlightenment) by Adorno and one faction basically got totally divorced from Marxist ideas, and the result of that was bad theories and bad praxis and then even worse being coopted as a capitalist intelligentsia. See also Thomas Picketty's Brahmin Left. I'm oversimplifying but there is a continued strain of this criticism (albeit largely on deaf ears).
I find this to be vile political posting, moving responsibility for Trump's rightwing fascism to a social theorists is just misguided, banal and does not belong here. Don't you have X for that?
It fits in with the contemporary mainstream on this site, unfortunately. Whenever politics comes up on HN, it invariably brings all the cranks out to play.
Wait until you discover that Alex Karp is a (Neo-)Marxist…
Philosophical insights and methods can be used for politics of any color.
I do agree that its wrong to say that Habermas would be responsible(!) for any of that though. As if thinking up stuff would make you responsible for the misuse of those ideas down the road.
1. "Responsibility" was indeed too strong. Involved in the chain of causality, maybe.
2. I'm not blaming Trump's rightwing fascism on social theorists. I wondered whether a backlash against overbearing postmodernism enabled Trump's election victories. Sorry if you find that question vile and banal; I find it rather consequential and important to avoid further fascists.
He signed that “never again” letter, completely buying into the exceptionalism of one group over all others… They kind of threw the baby out of the water and moved into Heidegger territory quickly. They seemed to put “who” over “what” very, very hastily. One would expect an enlightened mind to understand the difference and maybe phrase his concerns a bit more “inclusively”. But let’s be honest, it wasn’t a mistake.
This is well known, but isn't this exactly what you ask of a great thinker, to be able to transcend the biases of the culture and provide clarity and guidance? (Though of course at that age is hard to expect much from anyone).
Berlin perspective: It really doesn't feel that way. Germany's official political stance is very much "pro-Israel" and somewhat intentionally deaf and blind towards what is happening in Palestine (though not completely). Public opinion and discourse is much more nuanced though.
No we are not. 80% of us are against what Israel does in Palestine. But the Goverment and media will tell you otherwise. It's got nothing to do with our history. Konrad Adenauer--first chancellor--once said:
"The power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated. And therefore I have very deliberately and very consciously — and that was always my opinion — put all my strength, the best I could, to bring about a reconciliation between the Jewish people and the German people."
It was never about guilt, still is not. Germany has learned nothing from its past.
Totally disappointing. But coming from Germany, no surprise. German intellectualls and media totally ignore the suffering in Palesine. And fully suppress any solidarity with Palestine. By defunding, by cancelling, by smear campaigns (look up how they--overnight--deligitimised Greta Thunberg), by basically not reporting about what's going on there. And if you are state employed, you can basically bet on it losing your job once you show soliarity with Palestine.
Why did muslims have to leave their countries? The "cultural clash" didn't appear out of thin air. Muslims are in Europe in large numbers because of wars that Europe and the West either started, fueled, or failed to prevent.
To name a few conflicts incited by the West: The Nakba in 1948 displaced 750,000 Palestinians and created a refugee population that still hasn't been resolved.
The Soviet-Afghan War displaced 6M+ people.
The US invaded Iraq in 2003, directly creating the vacuum that spawned ISIS.
NATO bombed Libya into a failed state.
The US and Israel spent years destabilizing Syria long before the civil war made it the worst refugee crisis since WWII.
Europe's closest allies armed all sides of Yemen's proxy war.
=> Every single wave of Muslim refugees into Europe traces back to a conflict the West had its hands in. Blaming Muslims for being here while ignoring why they had to leave is not a serious position.
And now Iran, a country with 90+m population. And noone stops US/israel. What do you think will cause the next flow of refugees?
That's only partially true and it conveniently skips the last 15 years.
Yes, Germany's Turkish community largely traces back to Gastarbeiter recruitment in the 1960s/70s.
But since 2010, Germany alone received 850,000 Muslim migrants, with 86% of refugees coming from war zones like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Between 2013 and 2019, nearly 70% of all refugees in Germany were Muslim. Across Europe, large Muslim communities in Sweden, the Netherlands, and elsewhere originate from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and ex-Yugoslavia, not from guest worker programs.
The Gastarbeiter framing erases the millions who came because their countries were destroyed by wars the West participated in.
Approximately 5,5 million Muslims live in Germany. If about 1 million of these came as refugees, that is still a minority within minority.
"The Gastarbeiter framing erases the millions"
Don't try this newspeak at me. I said quite clearly that majority, not all, European Muslims are descendents of Gastarbeiters.
Or OK, lets use your newspeak. When it comes to framing, your framing of the wars in the Middle East is that they are completely attributable to the West. Do the locals have no agency? Didn't they engage in wars prior to rise of Western power? Is the Shi'a-Sunni split a Western plot? Did Islam spread by completely non-violent means?
Muslims are humans, and as such perfectly capable of waging wars on their own.
In my opinion, it's not about "Islam" or the "West" - it's about institutional capacity.
In 1990, both Syria and Türkiye were roughly comparable developmentally, with HDIs of 0.563 and 0.598 respectively. Yet by 2000, Türkiye's HDI significantly outpaced Syria's (0.669 versus 0.587) despite Turkiye going through severe political, social, and economic turmoil. And by 2010 (the eve of the Arab Spring), this difference in HDI was significantly exacerbated (0.750 in Turkiye versus 0.661 in Syria). Furthermore, both Turkiye and Syria participated in the Gulf War and didn't participate in the Iraq War.
The key difference was the billions the Assad regime spent on it's occupation of Lebanon from the 1980s to the 2005 Cedar Revolution, backing the PKK to antagonize Turkiye, and embezzling into slush funds the Assad family now uses to finance their life in exile in Moscow and Dubai. Meanwhile, during the same time period, Turkiye spent similar amounts building a welfare state and investing in expanding the social safety net and investing in infrastructure.
And other Muslim majority countries that were comparable to or significantly less developed than either Turkiye or Syria in 1990 such as Algeria (0.593), Indonesia (0.526), and Iran (0.613) were able to either catch up to Syria by 2010 such as Indonesia with an HDI of 0.667 or outpace it such as Algeria with an HDI of 0.721 and Iran with an HDI of 0.756 despite either starting from a lower base and going through an economic collapse in the 1990s (Indonesia), going through a devastating decade long civil war throughout the entirety of the 1990s (Algeria), or rebuilding after a decade long war and sanctions (Iran)
Even IRAQ, despite starting at a significantly lower base in 1990 (HDI of 0.497) was able to roughly catch up to contemporary Syria by 2010 (with an HDI of 0.629) despite the Gulf War in 1991-92, the sanctions regime, the Kurdish insurgency, the Shia insurgency, the Iraq War, and the subsequent Iraqi Civil War.
Fundamentally, the Assad regime mismanaged Syria, and it's lack of institutions outside of the Army and the Baath Party along with existing social fissures due to Hafez al-Assad's brutal repression of Sunnis in the 1970s-80s meant Syria's collapse was a question of "when" and not "if".
If institutions are robust, development is compounded. If institutions are weak, development slows down and fissures in society grow larger and larger leading to a breaking point.
Rick Roderick on Habermas.
The series "Self Under Siege" is one of my favorite things on YouTube. Highly recommend watching all 8 in order.
https://youtu.be/aXkmmfaZhEg
+1 These are incredible lectures and there's another series from Rick Roderick on the history of western philosophy that I also love: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxPmwaGMOAvsZp9vavFkyxYFZ...
For the benefit of those like me who haven't heard of Roderick, some further digging leads to this: https://rickroderick.org/max-roderick/
Major, major rabbit hole warning. You think you're about to read something about a philosophy professor, and what you get is an Alice Munro/Larry McMurtry mashup. His son seems to be a pretty amazing writer in his own right.
In a time in which Democracies are being threatened by authoritarians governments, such a loss is a reminder Democracy is not guarantee, you have to fight for it, every single day.
Habermas was truly a giant. Regardless of your political outlook, some engagement with his texts is time well spent. For an accessible on-ramp to his work, I recommend:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#PublSphe
"Jürgen Habermas is dead. The philosopher and sociologist died on Saturday in Starnberg at the age of 96."
https://www-spiegel-de.translate.goog/kultur/philosoph-juerg...
I love his
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
but feel this ponderous two-volume set
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac...
is thoroughly refuted by our last two decades of experience with electronic communications.
Thoroughly refuted? Sorry, but no
Perhaps the missing component is that not only is rationality communicable, but so is irrationally.
The memetic material out there has had an incredible and tumultuous era of rapid evolution. Theres been such radical pressure to get better at consuming our attention, at trying to get ideas to spread. The means have perhaps outstripped the Humana ability to communicate & make sense of so much highly weaponized memetic systems.
SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/habermas...
My favorite quote of Habermas ist about Luhmann’s[1] theory: "It‘s all wrong, but it‘s got quality".
[1] the Zettelkasten person
I like Luhmann’s theory better. What i like about it is that Luhmann argues that the smallest denominator of a social system is a realation between two. Habermas says it can be brought down to an individual. Which in my mind defeats the “social” part.
Havin not read the underlying theory, is the society of one constructed with the belief that one has relations to one's self?
That is, I could see that the idea of a society of two could be derived from a society of one in that I could extend my desire to be kind to my past, present, and future selves, to a desire to be kind to selves that are not my own.
Kind of like a computing network being a generalisation of the network that exists inside anyone one machine in that networking is just i/o with more steps and more wire?
Where exactly in Habermas is such an idea expressed?
He regularly wrote essays for "Süddeutsche Zeitung", commenting on the world's political situation. The last one I read was published in November 2025. Sharp as a knive, as always. I'll miss them.
What an accomplished life.
Obituary: https://archive.is/gQ3HB
RIP. He was a giant among philosophers.
I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories. But it looks like he was explicitly critical of postmodernism and other counter-enlightenment movements.
RIP.
The Frankfurter Schule was politically conservative, the "leftism" of present-day identity politics is a rehash of radical 1970s Maoism that simply coopts the Frankfurter Schule lexicon in agitating for a new "Great Cultural Revolution" throughout the West, consequences be damned. This is the "counter-enlightenment" part: the Maoist "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" saw Enlightenment values as reflecting "bourgeois privilege", and identity politics has wholly inherited this point of view. Frankfurter Schule members would have disagreed quite sharply with that position, their outlook was defined by a whole lot of nuance.
"Frankfurt School Critical Theory" went through several generations with different commitments and each of those generations was quite politically and theoretically diverse.
The only true statements that hold for all writers at all times are largely uninteresting.
What can be said with confidence is that Frankfurt School theorists were not "counter-enlightenment".
Adorno and Horkheimer were explicitly trying to explain why the ideal of the enlightenment - greater rationality in social and political affairs and a fuller realization of individual moral autonomy - had not been achieved in their time. They saw themselves, rightly, as more faithful heirs to the tradition in their attempt to "rescue" it than those who insisted it did not require rescue. You may disagree - many within the tradition of critical theory have - but I don't think readings of their texts which see them as "counter-enlightement" can be sustained.
"I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories."
With all due respect, this sentence betrays a complete unfamiliarity with "postmodernism", "the long march through the institutions", and "identity politics". It wildly anachronistic to conflate these. It makes about as much sense as saying that Mitterand was an Avignon pope.
Yes very interesting topic and HIGHLY relevant.
Here is a good essay from Moira Weigel that you might want to read: https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes...
It is called „ Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School“ and analysis Karp‘s PhD thesis. Which, even though he didnt write it under Habermas supervision, was highly influenced by the Frankfurt school (Adorno et al).
The author also provides some thoughts on your question. The connection between Critical Theory and Trumpism
Maybe he was critical, but he was also a part of them.
Very much so, I hold this view as someone who reads a bit of Critical Theory; Catherine Liu recently makes a case for this as well as disparate other public intellectuals from Chomsky to Zizek have also generally critiqued CT academics, postmodernists, etc. The basic argument is something like, Frankfurt School itself had a tension over their primary text (Dialectic of Enlightenment) by Adorno and one faction basically got totally divorced from Marxist ideas, and the result of that was bad theories and bad praxis and then even worse being coopted as a capitalist intelligentsia. See also Thomas Picketty's Brahmin Left. I'm oversimplifying but there is a continued strain of this criticism (albeit largely on deaf ears).
I find this to be vile political posting, moving responsibility for Trump's rightwing fascism to a social theorists is just misguided, banal and does not belong here. Don't you have X for that?
It fits in with the contemporary mainstream on this site, unfortunately. Whenever politics comes up on HN, it invariably brings all the cranks out to play.
Wait until you discover that Alex Karp is a (Neo-)Marxist…
Philosophical insights and methods can be used for politics of any color.
I do agree that its wrong to say that Habermas would be responsible(!) for any of that though. As if thinking up stuff would make you responsible for the misuse of those ideas down the road.
1. "Responsibility" was indeed too strong. Involved in the chain of causality, maybe.
2. I'm not blaming Trump's rightwing fascism on social theorists. I wondered whether a backlash against overbearing postmodernism enabled Trump's election victories. Sorry if you find that question vile and banal; I find it rather consequential and important to avoid further fascists.
Trump is the most postmodern politician, and MAGA the most postmodern of political movements
It just comes off a bit victim-blamey, I think. If it's not intended, you should certainly be aware that it can.
In all honesty that’s not even the worst part.
He signed that “never again” letter, completely buying into the exceptionalism of one group over all others… They kind of threw the baby out of the water and moved into Heidegger territory quickly. They seemed to put “who” over “what” very, very hastily. One would expect an enlightened mind to understand the difference and maybe phrase his concerns a bit more “inclusively”. But let’s be honest, it wasn’t a mistake.
Anyway, we’ll take the good parts and move on.
RIP.
96 years old. He lived a "full life".
I have to say I'm quite disappointed by his attitude against Palestine. RIP, but not with the victims.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/israel-hamas-w...
The majority of Germans is completely biased towards Zionism because of their history, so it's more of a cultural than a personal thing.
This is well known, but isn't this exactly what you ask of a great thinker, to be able to transcend the biases of the culture and provide clarity and guidance? (Though of course at that age is hard to expect much from anyone).
Berlin perspective: It really doesn't feel that way. Germany's official political stance is very much "pro-Israel" and somewhat intentionally deaf and blind towards what is happening in Palestine (though not completely). Public opinion and discourse is much more nuanced though.
No we are not. 80% of us are against what Israel does in Palestine. But the Goverment and media will tell you otherwise. It's got nothing to do with our history. Konrad Adenauer--first chancellor--once said:
"The power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated. And therefore I have very deliberately and very consciously — and that was always my opinion — put all my strength, the best I could, to bring about a reconciliation between the Jewish people and the German people."
It was never about guilt, still is not. Germany has learned nothing from its past.
Totally disappointing. But coming from Germany, no surprise. German intellectualls and media totally ignore the suffering in Palesine. And fully suppress any solidarity with Palestine. By defunding, by cancelling, by smear campaigns (look up how they--overnight--deligitimised Greta Thunberg), by basically not reporting about what's going on there. And if you are state employed, you can basically bet on it losing your job once you show soliarity with Palestine.
Europe also has a non-trivial problem with both Islamic terrorism and cultural clash between indigenous Europeans and newly settled Muslims.
That reduces empathy towards other Muslims quite significantly.
that has nothing to do with it. you can see the same thing in other conflicts. it's just more convenient to look away.
Why did muslims have to leave their countries? The "cultural clash" didn't appear out of thin air. Muslims are in Europe in large numbers because of wars that Europe and the West either started, fueled, or failed to prevent.
To name a few conflicts incited by the West: The Nakba in 1948 displaced 750,000 Palestinians and created a refugee population that still hasn't been resolved.
The Soviet-Afghan War displaced 6M+ people.
The US invaded Iraq in 2003, directly creating the vacuum that spawned ISIS.
NATO bombed Libya into a failed state.
The US and Israel spent years destabilizing Syria long before the civil war made it the worst refugee crisis since WWII.
Europe's closest allies armed all sides of Yemen's proxy war.
=> Every single wave of Muslim refugees into Europe traces back to a conflict the West had its hands in. Blaming Muslims for being here while ignoring why they had to leave is not a serious position.
And now Iran, a country with 90+m population. And noone stops US/israel. What do you think will cause the next flow of refugees?
Most Muslims in Europe are descendants of Gastarbeiters from the 1960s and 1970s.
That's only partially true and it conveniently skips the last 15 years.
Yes, Germany's Turkish community largely traces back to Gastarbeiter recruitment in the 1960s/70s.
But since 2010, Germany alone received 850,000 Muslim migrants, with 86% of refugees coming from war zones like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Between 2013 and 2019, nearly 70% of all refugees in Germany were Muslim. Across Europe, large Muslim communities in Sweden, the Netherlands, and elsewhere originate from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and ex-Yugoslavia, not from guest worker programs.
The Gastarbeiter framing erases the millions who came because their countries were destroyed by wars the West participated in.
Approximately 5,5 million Muslims live in Germany. If about 1 million of these came as refugees, that is still a minority within minority.
"The Gastarbeiter framing erases the millions"
Don't try this newspeak at me. I said quite clearly that majority, not all, European Muslims are descendents of Gastarbeiters.
Or OK, lets use your newspeak. When it comes to framing, your framing of the wars in the Middle East is that they are completely attributable to the West. Do the locals have no agency? Didn't they engage in wars prior to rise of Western power? Is the Shi'a-Sunni split a Western plot? Did Islam spread by completely non-violent means?
Muslims are humans, and as such perfectly capable of waging wars on their own.
In my opinion, it's not about "Islam" or the "West" - it's about institutional capacity.
In 1990, both Syria and Türkiye were roughly comparable developmentally, with HDIs of 0.563 and 0.598 respectively. Yet by 2000, Türkiye's HDI significantly outpaced Syria's (0.669 versus 0.587) despite Turkiye going through severe political, social, and economic turmoil. And by 2010 (the eve of the Arab Spring), this difference in HDI was significantly exacerbated (0.750 in Turkiye versus 0.661 in Syria). Furthermore, both Turkiye and Syria participated in the Gulf War and didn't participate in the Iraq War.
The key difference was the billions the Assad regime spent on it's occupation of Lebanon from the 1980s to the 2005 Cedar Revolution, backing the PKK to antagonize Turkiye, and embezzling into slush funds the Assad family now uses to finance their life in exile in Moscow and Dubai. Meanwhile, during the same time period, Turkiye spent similar amounts building a welfare state and investing in expanding the social safety net and investing in infrastructure.
And other Muslim majority countries that were comparable to or significantly less developed than either Turkiye or Syria in 1990 such as Algeria (0.593), Indonesia (0.526), and Iran (0.613) were able to either catch up to Syria by 2010 such as Indonesia with an HDI of 0.667 or outpace it such as Algeria with an HDI of 0.721 and Iran with an HDI of 0.756 despite either starting from a lower base and going through an economic collapse in the 1990s (Indonesia), going through a devastating decade long civil war throughout the entirety of the 1990s (Algeria), or rebuilding after a decade long war and sanctions (Iran)
Even IRAQ, despite starting at a significantly lower base in 1990 (HDI of 0.497) was able to roughly catch up to contemporary Syria by 2010 (with an HDI of 0.629) despite the Gulf War in 1991-92, the sanctions regime, the Kurdish insurgency, the Shia insurgency, the Iraq War, and the subsequent Iraqi Civil War.
Fundamentally, the Assad regime mismanaged Syria, and it's lack of institutions outside of the Army and the Baath Party along with existing social fissures due to Hafez al-Assad's brutal repression of Sunnis in the 1970s-80s meant Syria's collapse was a question of "when" and not "if".
If institutions are robust, development is compounded. If institutions are weak, development slows down and fissures in society grow larger and larger leading to a breaking point.
Started his life supporting genocide. Ended his life supporting genocide.
May he learn something in his next life.
What an absolutely idiotic statement