In Memoriam Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026)

Public debate is often marked by conscious or unconscious misunderstandings. Opponents’ arguments are distorted to make them easier to refute. Ignorance creates warped images. Relevant facts are concealed. Half‑truths obscure and stupefy. In this situation, it is the task of conceptual analysis to amend the shortcomings and resurrect the debate so that the exchange of views becomes transparent and agreements can be made.

This was the reasoning of the German philosopher and social scientist Jürgen Habermas, who recently passed away at the age of 96 and who was awarded the Skyttean Prize in 2024. Habermas was the leading figure of the so‑called Frankfurt School at the Institut für Sozialforschung, which, after its exile in the United States, had returned to Germany. Habermas completed his doctorate in 1962 with the dissertation Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (“The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”), on how an educated middle class emerged in Western Europe during the 18th century and, in the coffeehouses with their newspapers, discussed and argued in a freer manner than in the rigid court culture. But it was with the monumental work Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (“The Theory of Communicative Action,” 1981) that Habermas made his breakthrough. In this work he highlighted communication as central to human interaction and presented his ambitious program for an improved, more rational political discourse.

If misunderstandings are removed, it becomes easier to reach agreements, Habermas maintained. But is consensus really the goal? Yes, that was his conviction. “One has not at all understood what it means to grasp the meaning of an utterance if one does not know that it is meant to serve the purpose of reaching an agreement with someone about something—that is, the achievement of a consensus whose concept implies that it ‘holds’ for the participants” – undeniably something of a persuasive definition. Behind the diligent cleaner-upper, we glimpse Rousseau and his volonté générale. That the goal might instead be to distinguish differences so that citizens are given clear alternatives to choose between never seems to have occurred to him.

Interest corrupts knowledge. The deficiencies in communication are due above all to the ruling class benefiting from distorting the conversation. But oppression can be eased, even dissolved, and humanity “liberated,” according to Habermas’s revolutionary trumpet call. Fittingly, he became a symbolic figure for the 1968 movement and appeared throughout his life as a prolific commentator in political debate—from rejecting attempts to relativize the unique character of the Holocaust, to criticizing what he saw as overly uncritical enthusiasm for German reunification that should not obscure the antagonism between West and East, all the way to the financial crisis of the 1990s and the need to address the European monetary system.

Reading—and even more so listening to—Habermas was not easy. His language is lengthy and convoluted, which has prompted considerable irony directed at an author whose aim was to promote comprehensible communication. For those of us who wrote conceptual‑analytical dissertations during the 1960s, he was the great source of inspiration. At a time when political science was shaped by behaviorism and the breakthrough of quantitative methods, he gave us self‑confidence, courage, and the conviction that what we were doing mattered. But our stylistic ideal was another. We took it from our teacher Carl Arvid Hessler who—being allergic to anything called theory—wrote in the foreword to his book on the state‑church debate that as a conceptual analyst one should write “in an honest effort to ‘understand’ but without suppressing the critical reflections that have arisen,” a less pretentious but exemplary clear summary of Habermas’s research program.