Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday. His death has been the occasion for several substantial and interesting obituaries. So far, I prefer Gal Beckerman’s in the New York Times.

I took a seminar on Habermas in 1988, when I was a college junior. Georgia Warnke was the professor, and I have kept her useful packet of readings to this day. Habermas crystallized my early thinking about politics and philosophy and has remained a pillar for me ever since. I discuss him in most of my books, with the most general and extensive presentation in chapter 5 of What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (2022) The title of that book basically captures Habermas in a phrase. I have also recorded a 29-minute introductory lecture on him.

It is misleading to treat Habermas as a proponent of rational, civil discourse. (See “Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas,” 2018). I suspect that more Americans have read Iris Marion Young’s critique of Habermas (“Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy, Political Theory, 2011) than have read Habermas itself. The late and lamented Iris Young caricatured him in that article. If Habermas wanted everyone to talk calmly all the time, then why did he conclude his two-volume magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, with a celebration of disruptive social movements?

Habermas lived so long and became famous so early that his public role is itself an interesting phenomenon. Apparently, Ronald Dworkin remarked that even Habermas’ fame is famous, and it is worth asking why someone who wrote such thorny theory occupied the position of (arguably) the most influential German thinker for half a century.

I took a whole semester course on Habermas–in English, on the other side of the Atlantic–when he still had 38 years ahead of him. That is an indication of his stature. But it does not mean that he shaped the course of history, or even of scholarship.

In Postwar, Tony Judt discusses “the demise of the continental intellectual.” On May 31, 2003, Habermas plus Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, and several other leading thinkers published coordinated essays against the Iraq War in distinguished European newspapers. The result “passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored the authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. … The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition–and no one came” (pp. 785-7).

I am not quoting Judt today to cast aspersions on Habermas, whose work was deep and broad. I suspect that changes in media and communications have reduced the influence of serious intellectuals. Besides, Habermas may never have wanted to be the new Jean-Paul Sartre. Elsewhere, I have discussed how Michel Foucault (born just three years before Habermas) deliberately shunned the role of the “universal intellectual”; and perhaps we are better off without such people. By all accounts, Habermas welcomed criticism and learned from a wide range of responses. He modeled what he advocated: listening and learning from others. I think his work will long outlive him.

See also: introducing Habermas; saving Habermas from the deliberative democrats; Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas: Nonviolent Campaigns and Deliberation in an Era of Authoritarianism; Matthew G. Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography, and many other posts.