Jürgen Habermas Obituary (18 June 1929 – 14 March 2026)
Translated by Vanessa Rampton
“Philosophers don’t change the world. What we need is to practice a little more solidarity: without that, intelligent action will remain permanently foundationless and inconsequential. Such practice, certainly, requires rational institutions; it needs rules and communicative forms that don’t morally overtax citizens, but rather exact the virtue of an orientation toward the common good in small change”.[1] Jürgen Habermas
Towards the end of his life, his irrepressible drive began to wane: “I still visit the grave [of his wife Ute, who died in June 2025] almost every day, and this walk also makes me realise that survival has its limits”, he wrote a few weeks before his death. For Habermas, human life was not merely a matter of survival, nor a biologically driven imperative of physical self-preservation. In the long run, a life without meaning or even the hope of it is not possible for us, as persons vulnerable to disease but whose cognitive capacities allow for reflective judgment and action. Our lives do not simply unfold, we must actively give them a sense of direction. An irritability that is not merely sensory belongs to life itself. It gives us pleasure and propels us forward. But it also provokes us, unsettles us, arouses indignation and fatigue. His multidimensional yet disciplined irritability predisposed Jürgen Habermas to engage with very different intellectual problems using a diverse set of methodological tools:
How can democracy, understood as self-legislation by citizens, be reconceived in modern societies beyond town- and beer-hall meetings? What prevents positive law, typically endowed with far greater coercive power than morality, from degenerating into the law of the strongest? If it is not weapons pointed at us, but rather a request, an appeal, a call—that is, the summoning word directed to us—that can nonetheless move us to act, what does this reveal about the role of language in human interaction? Why does the persistent refusal to answer “why” questions by offering explanatory and justifying reasons register as authoritarian? Why does this refusal ultimately harden into the brutal excommunication of the other as when, in response to concentration-camp prisoner Primo Levi’s question “Warum?” (Why?), his tormentors hurl back at him: “Hier ist kein Warum” (There is no ‘why? here).[2] What conclusions can therefore be drawn about the role of reasons in human forms of life? And if the philosopher takes Habermas’s maxim of “methodological atheism” seriously, thereby denying God any explanatory or justificatory role in argumentation, can morality—such as that of human rights— be more than an expression of a contingent majority will?
Habermas pursued these questions by means of philosophical analysis and conceptual synthesis, but not exclusively. He also drew on political science, the comparative history of ideas, the sociology of law, and theories of private and public law. Very early on in the 1960s, inspired by the work of Karl Bühler, he engaged with the findings and theories of linguistics and developmental psychology. At home a massive bookshelf made a warmly evocative room with a view of the forest feel cramped; it was crammed with works by Eric H. Lenneberg, Noam Chomsky, Theodore Mischel, R.S. Peters, and his friend Lawrence Kohlberg and, later on, those of Michael Tomasello and Merlin Donald. This reliance on individual disciplines is one reason he was not regarded merely as a philosopher. Habermas did not gather raw data like an experimental scientist; instead, he conducted what might be called “meta-analyses”. Yet he did not shy away from unstructured realities, as they appear, for example, in the complex tapestry of political life.
Given the breadth of Habermas’s topics, it is easy to get mired in detail or simply fall behind current research. Scholarly rigor involves more than knowledge and research experience alone. It also requires a rational attitude to one’s own ignorance and the limits of one’s expertise.[3] Habermas achieved this by linking his research agenda to the creation of manageable, informally structured discussion forums. He succeeded in this more fully both before and after his time as co-director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World (1971–1981) than he did during his Starnberg years. At the Starnberg Institute, he felt overly responsible for his subordinates’ work and outcomes. His research agenda remained fundamentally that of an individual, and not of a confident content manager coordinating the work of a large number of researchers. This individualism likely played a role in his initial hesitation to accept the directorship in Starnberg. (He ultimately did not send the rejection letter he drafted to the Max Planck Society.) Nevertheless, he was not a solitary figure like the philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996), for example. Despite his distance from the natural sciences, he resembled his laboratory-based and more team-oriented colleagues in his approach to organising research.
“Jürgen was always a good listener,” his lifelong friend, historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, once observed. And Habermas drew on the knowledge of others and the different sensibilities of those he engaged with. His quick mind and tendency to exaggerate, however, often led him to make hasty, harsh judgments about others that could be hurtful. This flaw was offset by an egalitarianism that was arguably his greatest virtue. For instance, he once apologized to a doctoral student he had never met, who sent him unsolicited her dissertation on AI-based forms of communication and their consequences for democracy; he explained that his reply was so [two months] late because his wife was now [in 2024] recovering after a long illness. His apology was accompanied by a three-page detailed, and encouraging commentary on the dissertation, despite having no formal review obligations.
Unlike his highly esteemed rival, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998), Habermas was not a systems thinker. He consistently upheld the distinction between theory and the matter at hand, a distinction that manifests in the research process as a competition between fragmentary theories addressing the same subject matter. It is not an internal feature of theory. “The subject matter” is not simply the object as constituted by theory, its measuring methods and tacit presuppositions, its forms of representation, and its practices of intervention – be the issue a disease like Alzheimer’s, codified norms such as positivized fundamental rights, or an emotional state like a phobia. Habermas belonged to the “realists who had not yet decided what reality is”, to quote the contemporary poet Charles Simic.[4] This did not preclude him from developing far-reaching, generalizing theses about the social world, around which much of his work revolved. For example: (1) The persistence of domination rests on a “Legitimitätsglauben”[5] (belief in legitimacy) among those who are dominated, a belief that simultaneously carries the potential for contestation. (2) Is and ought are not externally opposed to one another. (3) Although we cannot provide watertight ultimate justifications, we can improve our convictions without resorting to so-called victor’s justice.
Belief in Legitimacy and Intersubjectivity
In the long run no regime can survive without a large number of its subjects believing that it is legitimate. That is why the dictator Vladimir Putin has invested even more heavily in propaganda than in his imperialist war machine. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) even argued that political rule rests exclusively on opinion.[6] Habermas does not go that far. But he ties political rule—or more precisely, legitimate law-making—not merely to subjective factors like psychologically describable fulfillment of expectations, but to reasons that can justify those expectations.[7] Agreement or consensus regarding government often initially consists only of shared intentions that enable the coordination of social action, understood as social practices. According to Habermas, this consensus exhibits a “porous and fractured intersubjectivity”.[8] It is porous or permeable to experiences involving beliefs about the world, because these experiences cannot always be made intelligible through pre-established interpretations, and can therefore be unsettling. This is Habermas’s pragmatist legacy. (He dedicated his first seminar as a professor—in Heidelberg in 1962—to pragmatist John Dewey, among others.) And the consensus has the status of “fragmented intersubjectivity” because it fractures in the face of divergences in the feelings, judgments, and actions of others. This interlocutor is neither a serialized other nor a pure type, nor merely a representative of social authority, whether as pater familias, state official, CEO, Pope or Ayatollah, the Party, or elevated academic reviewer. Habermas designates this semi-socialized counterpart a second person. A second person is an “I” who is nevertheless bound to others through a social relation of participatory reactions such as response, inquiry, criticism, consent, indignation, and offense.[9] Habermas argues that it is the role of a second person that enables objectivity through intersubjectivity—that is, that we may provisionally claim correctness for our actions and truth for our judgments because our reasons have withstood the objection of the other.[10]
This is a thesis directed against his friend Richard Rorty, who, together with Thomas McCarthy and Richard Bernstein, opened the doors of U.S. academic life to him. Rorty, after all, wishes to replace the pursuit of objectivity with that of ever-expanding solidarity. Habermas, however, did not really develop his thesis and support it with arguments. He did not complete a book-length manuscript on the theory of rationality after 1992.
Is and Ought
Whenever Habermas’s idea of consensus as subject to testing by argument-driven speech and counter-speech (“discourse”) is invoked, a standard objection arises. The idea betrays excessive optimism; it is “idealistic” in the colloquial sense of the word. According to this objection, Habermas neglects to acknowledge power as the capacity to impose one’s will on others while remaining insulated from corrective learning, as is often the case for actors in financial capitalism. The idea of discourse proves inadequate even for the formation of scientific convictions, let alone in a political public sphere dominated by what the Swiss writer Max Frisch calls “Eigentümermacht” (proprietors’ power).[11]
Habermas counters this objection in an anthropological, an empirical, and a rational argument. We humans cannot fully apprehend ourselves from an external, objective standpoint, like a bioengineer, without becoming opaque to ourselves. We remain entangled in participatory reactions whereby we call upon one another to do something, criticize, praise, and apologize. It is in these reactions — this thesis holds — that a claim about what ought to be is articulated, as distinct from the expression of one party’s desires or will. The “ought” is constitutive of human life itself and cannot be fully reduced to an expression of collective will. Otherwise, how could a collective will be subject to criticism? This is the anthropological argument regarding the human way of life, and what Habermas terms the tension between facticity and validity.
In his book Between Facts and Norms, he attempted to demonstrate empirically that law does not coincide with mere power. Democratically established law constrains power, it is not simply putty in the hands of the powerful. That is why the phrase “there are no crimes, only bad lawyers”, is false. And that is also why a judiciary that upholds such law is among the first targets of those in power. The theory of Between Facts and Norms supports and explains these theses and findings. It provides an empirical argument that effective legal “oughts” are not merely the will of the rich and powerful. This arises from the attempt to track down “fragments of an ‘existing reason’”, as Habermas, drawing on Hegel, repeatedly said.
His prudential argument for the connection between human existence and the ought is straightforward: we have no better option for distinguishing between power and law, between Wahr-Sein (being true) and Für-wahr-Erklären (declaring something true), between right and wrong—even if these distinctions repeatedly require correction when applied in concrete contexts. If we abandon these distinctions, we can no longer differentiate between, for example, a childhood-vaccination recommendation issued by medical charlatan and current U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, or by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) led by Professor of Medicine Peter J. Hotez. Nor can one counter those who dismiss human rights as a project of Western imperialism, a move that simultaneously pushes Iranian women, Ukrainian civilians, Nicaraguan priests, and Indonesian vegetable farmers engaged in climate litigation into the imperialist camp. For they are currently among those who lay claim to these rights.
Corrections for the Better
Of course Habermas, his ideas and arguments, remain vulnerable to the idealism objection. To the chagrin of his early mentor, fellow student and lifelong friend Karl-Otto Apel, Habermas dispensed with ultimate justifications. This renunciation is motivated, among other things, by the insight that even the vocabulary of ultimate justification and the distribution of justificatory obligations are temporally circumscribed. (Rightly, feminists often speak of epistemic injustice in connection with this distribution of the burden of justification.) When, for example, arguments are countered with violence, one inevitably relies on specific, historically variable conceptions of what constitutes violence and what constitutes justified doubt. A deliberate kick with a boot is an instance of violence. But for much of history, lewd masculine speech went largely unrecognized as verbal violence. Justified doubt provides a reason that questions the truth of a belief. But there is always someone who voices a doubt. Who should be heard? Those who understand the matter at hand. Yes, that’s right! But, for example, it took a long time for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to incorporate local women farmers’ knowledge – on droughts, resilient tree species, restorative farming methods and the like – into its meticulous opinion-forming procedures. Habermas, like U.S. philosophers Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), relies on the self-correcting nature of such processes. In doing so, he maintains that distinctions between law and power, Wahr-Sein (being true) and Für-wahr-Halten (holding to be true), but also concepts such as equal treatment or human dignity can have a corrective effect insofar as they challenge the status quo. Beyond being essentially contested, some concepts participate in active contestation. Their pragmatic function can challenge their codified semantic meaning. In Habermas’s view, reformist meliorism takes the place of watertight, definitive justification, but also of a pessimistic preoccupation with fallibility. But what this reformism should actually look like remains an open question, one among others.
Indeed, Habermas repeatedly considered the epistemological implications of this reformism, though largely in essays. Even there, the image of self-correcting processes of belief-formation was sketched only in broad strokes.[12]
Certainly, in his last major work, Also a History of Philosophy, Habermas addresses, among other issues, how the existential wealth of experience stored in the language, imagery, rituals, and music of religions can be mobilized to deepen secular forms of understanding the world. And above all, how can this happen without God? This wealth of experience becomes palpable, for example, when religious adherents find their voice at an open grave, shifting a distressing impression to a consolatory expression. But despite the book’s extensive scholarly textual analyses, Habermas takes pars pro toto or the part for the whole: Protestant prayer-based faith ultimately stands in for all religion. The originally envisaged sociology of religion was only marginally realised in Also a History of Philosophy. As a result, the potentially fatal and decidedly non-reformist power of religious organizations remains somewhat underexplored.
Reformism is not typically associated with cognitive processes or scholarship, much less with the symbolism and languages of religions. Rather, it is the domain of the political sphere. For Habermas, reformism is more than a mode of action within democracy, understanding democracy as a legally organized process aimed at fairly shaping citizens’ socially determined life chances so that all share the prospect of a self-determined, reasonably good life.
Habermas never shared the Left’s contempt for or denunciation of bourgeois democracy and reformism. As he explained, he had learned too much, too early, from analyses of law and the rule-of-law state by Austro-Marxists such as Otto Bauer (1881–1938) and Karl Renner (1870–1950). The labor law scholar Hugo Sinzheimer (1875–1945) was also a source of inspiration.[13] Yet social reform through democracy rests on the prior condition that societies are politically governable. Systems theorists such as Niklas Luhmann and Helmut Willke voiced strong and well-articulated doubts about this. Habermas’s colleague and friend, the perceptive sociologist Claus Offe, who passed away in October 2025, was also not very optimistic about the intentional democratic governance of societies, particularly in light of what he called “the second-strike capacity” of capital owners.
It is within deliberative democratic theory that Habermas’s theses and arguments are discussed most vigorously. To forestall renewed accusations of idealism, a plausible answer to the difficult question “how is democratic governance possible?” must be articulated, incorporating insights from, among others, Katharina Pistor, Fritz Scharpf, and Wolfgang Streeck. However, one should resist the centralist fallacy that transnational problems—such as protecting our ecological niche or safeguarding global public goods—can only be resolved by centralized, supranational actors.
It is noteworthy that since 2025, the Trump regime appears to have demonstrated the primacy of politics over a well-founded skepticism towards governance, even if this stance entails replacing democracy with extractive institutions[14] designed to secure the economic plunder and appropriation by the “one percent”. Habermas could not see this as an irony of history. The regime’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the political West weighed too heavily on him for that. Habermas had no inclinations towards the philosophy of history. Yet the idea that history exhibits ratchet effects was not foreign to him: not only individuals, but collectives too are capable of learning. The idea that conflicts can be understood and overcome, and give rise to lasting rules of coexistence and universalism from which there is no going back, is plainly false. But this only justifies a distrust of history, not defeatism. “Keep your chin up”, Habermas would have said—back when he was once again engaged in political debate and, for all his courage, would at times feel a little queasy.
From his home desk he could watch small, reddish-brown artists at work who—like him—deftly shifted terrain without falling: dexterous squirrels, pausing occasionally as they leapt from tree to tree. Now they pursue their activity alone. Like those theorists who preserve a multifaceted irritability without resentment; who seek to identify society-wide practices through which we can approximate the ideal of considerate interactions among vulnerable humans and other living beings; and who seek practicable forms of civility, argument-guided speech and counter-speech – forms wholly distinct from the abstract, and ultimately repressive “ought” of moral entrepreneurs.
Originally published in the online magazine Soziopolis. Gesellschaft beobachten on March 23, 2026, https://www.soziopolis.de/juergen-habermas-3.html
Lutz Wingert held a Chair in Philosophy at ETH Zurich until 2024. He completed his doctorate and habilitation under Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt am Main, and served as his research fellow and Wissenschaftlicher Assistent from 1986 to 1994.
Vanessa Rampton was a research fellow at Lutz Wingert’s Philosophy Chair from 2015 to 2024, and is currently a senior researcher at Assisted Lab in the Department of Medical Humanities and French Studies at University of St Gallen.
[1] Jürgen Habermas, The Past as Future, ed. Michael Haller, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 96-97.
[2] On the epistemological implications of Levi’s quote see Romila Storjohann, Wie werden Begründungen gebildet und wie werden sie möglich? Über Funktionsweise und Struktur von Rationalität (How are Reasons Formed and How is the Formation of Reasons Possible? On the Function and Structure of Rationality (Hamburg: Meiner 2021), p. 81. The source is Primo Levi, If This Is A Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: The Orion Press, 1959), p. 24.
[3] Nadja El Kassar vigorously elaborates this in her book, How Should We Rationally Deal with Ignorance? A Philosophical Study (New York and London: Routledge, 2025).
[4] Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Tellers. Essays and Memoirs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1994), p. 4. Here “they” refers to the poets Robert Frost, Charles Olson and Elizabeth Bishop.
[5] Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlaß. vol. 4, Herrschaft. Studienausgabe der Max-Weber Gesamtausgabe I/22-4, ed. Edith Hanke with Thomas Kroll (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), p. 217.
[6] “It is (..) on opinion only that government is founded; and the maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination. But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes or praterorian bands, like men by their opinion”. David Hume, “Of the First Principles Of Government” (1742), in Ibid., Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 24.
[7] See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, 2nd printing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 146 ff.
On Hume see J. Habermas, Also a History of Philosophy, vol. 2, The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), pp. 276 ff. and vol. 3, Rational Freedom. Traces of the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge, pp. 145 ff.
[8] Jürgen Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices”, in Ibid., Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p.140.
[9] Peter F. Strawson refers to “participant reactive attitudes”. See his “Freedom and Resentment” in Ibid., Freedom and Resentment and other essays (London: Methuen & Co., 1974), p. 10.
[10] See Jürgen Habermas, “Communicative Action and the Detranscendentalized ‘Use of Reason’”, in Ibid., Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. Cioran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), p. 75.
[11] Max Frisch, “Wir hoffen: Preisrede zur Verleihung des Friedenspreises des Deutschen Buchhandels 1976”, in Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, ed. Ansprachen anlässlich der Verleihung des Friedenspreises des Deutschen Buchhandels (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 51.
[12] See Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017) and Ibid., Postmetaphysical Thinking II, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), particularly Section I, The Lifeworld as a Space of Reasons. See also his essay “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn”, in Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cook, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 343 ff.
[13] On reformist labor law, in addition to the work of Alain Supiot, see, for example, Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck, Democracy at Work, Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022). See also Marie Diekmann, Die demokratische Bedeutung des kollektiven Arbeitsrechts. Der Arbeitskampf zwischen Zivilrechts- und Grundrechtsdogmatik (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2023) a study supported by Klaus Günther, himself the primary source of inspiration for Habermas’s legal-theoretical writings. These texts can also be seen as constructive continuations of Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We don’t Talk about It) (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).
[14] On the concept of extractive institutions and organisations see Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business/Random House, 2012), e.g. pp. 79 ff., 429 ff.