Jürgen Habermas is widely acknowledged as the most important European philosopher living today. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written works address topics ranging from social and political theory to aesthetics, epistemology, language and philosophy of religion. His ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political and legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. Habermas has also figured prominently as a public intellectual, regularly intervening in contemporary European political discussions through various prominent engagements, including interviews, public lectures, and debates (most prominently with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—later Pope Benedict XVI—at the Catholic University of Bavaria in Munich in 2004). He is the heir to the founders of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, with whom he studied in the 1950s at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Institute for Social Research.

Early Works: Habermas’s Contribution to Social Theory and his Account of the Public Sphere

The first period of Habermas’s intellectual evolution spans roughly the time from his dissertation to the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests (1968 [1971]). The early capstone of this period is the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962 [1989]) [ST], a canonical text in critical theory, but it also includes Theory and Practice (1963 [1973]), On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967 [1988]), and the essays published in Philosophical-Political Profiles ([1983]). This section details some of the key concepts that Habermas developed in this period.

The Public Sphere: Emergence and Decay

Habermas’s focus in ST is the emergence of what he describes as the bourgeois “public sphere” in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe. Habermas argues that prior to the eighteenth century, European public life had been dominated by a “representational” culture, where one party (usually either the royal court or the established church) sought to “represent” itself by projecting its symbols of power on its audience, with the aim of overwhelming its subjects.  Habermas claims that the “concentration of the publicity of representation at the court attained the high point of refinement” in Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, which meant to show the greatness of the French state and its King by overpowering the senses of visitors to the Palace. In Habermas’s historical narrative (borrowed in part from Marxist theory), “representational” culture corresponds to the feudal stage of development, while Öffentlichkeit (the public sphere) emerges only when feudal modes of organization are displaced by capitalism. 

Generalizing from historical developments in Britain, France, and Germany in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Habermas argues that Öffentlichkeit is marked by the emergence of a public space outside of the control of the state. Especially as a result of the democratization of the press, private individuals begin to be empowered to exchange views and knowledge spontaneously and independently. In Habermas’s view, the growth in newspapers, journals, reading clubs, Masonic lodges, and coffeehouses in eighteenth-century Europe marked the gradual replacement of “representational” culture with Öffentlichkeit culture. While “public” was previously “synonymous with ‘state-related,’” it now comes to refer to those subjects of debate which are addressed to the people at large exercising their deliberative function in a collective capacity.

In Habermas’s telling, the essential characteristic of the Öffentlichkeit culture is its “critical” nature.  Thus, the transition from “representational culture” to the public sphere is marked by increasing civic engagement and by the “people’s public use of their reason” in critical questioning of arbitrary forms of power. This evolution represents more than merely a transformation in modes of communication and debate, for it implicates the nature of the legitimate exercise of power as such: for the first time in history, private individuals seek to subject public rule to “standards of ‘reason’ and […] forms of ‘law’” through which they aim to hold accountable both the withering absolutist state, and the emerging democratic order itself. Henceforth, the rule exercised by the modern state can only claim legitimacy to the extent that its existence is made an object of critical scrutiny by public rationality. While Habermas traces the emergence of the public sphere to the theories of Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Baron de Montesquieu, he argues that it only reached its maturity when it was rehabilitated as the general “law of practical reason” governing constitutionalism in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the public sphere, including the growth of a commercial mass media, which turned the critical public into a passive consumer public, and the welfare state, which merged the state with society so thoroughly that the public sphere was squeezed out. The structural transformation of the public sphere in the late twentieth century constitutes a process of social disintegration: “for about a century the social foundations of this sphere have been caught up in a process of decomposition.”

Hence, Habermas describes a transition from the liberal public sphere which originated in the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolution to a media-dominated public sphere in the current era of what he calls “welfare-state capitalism and mass democracy.” In this transformation, “public opinion” shifts from rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. Rational debate and consensus has thus been replaced by managed discussion and manipulation by the machinations of advertising and political consulting agencies. (All quotations from ST.)

The Theory of Communicative Action: Habermas’s “Linguistic Turn”

After Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas turns his attention to transforming and updating Marxism by drawing on systems theory (Luhmann), developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg), and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Mead, etc.). Legitimation Crisis (1971 [1973]), his 1971 Princeton Gauss Lectures, published in On Pragmatics of Social Interaction (1984 [2001]), and the essays published in Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976 [1979]) belong to this period.  

In the Gauss Lectures Habermas proposes that social theory take a “linguistic turn,” arguing that human action and understanding can be fruitfully analyzed as having a linguistic structure. This marks an important departure from Marxist dialectical materialism: Habermas criticizes Marxism for its narrow focus on material modes of production at the expense of the broader cultural factors such as group cooperation and rational creativity. At the end of this period, and nearly twenty years after the publication of Structural Transformation, he produced his The Theory of Communicative Action (1985) [TOC], perhaps his most influential work.

In the preface to the TOC Habermas announces that his project has three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to the individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory; (2) to construct a concept of society that integrates the “lifeworld” and the paradigm of structural systems; and, finally, (3) to sketch out a critical theory of modernity which analyzes and accounts for what he believes are its pathologies.  

Habermas develops these themes through a somewhat unusual combination of theoretical constructions with historical reconstructions of the ideas of “classical” social theorists. The thinkers discussed—Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Lukacs, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Parsons—are, he holds, still very much alive: “I treat Weber, Mead, Durkheim, and Parsons as classics,” he writes, “that is, as theorists of society who still have something to say to us.” TOC, therefore, aims at “historical reconstructions with systematic intent”—criticism that aims at uncovering and overcoming the shortcomings of these theories, while simultaneously incorporating their positive contributions.

In general, one might say critically of the political implications of these early and most influential works of Habermas that he did not sufficiently acknowledge the limits to individual rationality and rational communication in politics, and the inevitably contentious nature of the economic and social goods that people desire. Because of this no political order can be completely acceptable to all, or be rationally legitimate in their eyes. Moreover, despite Habermas’s attempt to rescue political practice from dominance by technical discussion, one might question whether he, or other critical theorists, accounts sufficiently for pride, courage, statesmanship, patriotism, and the virtues of political life, generally.

Constitutional Patriotism, the Post-Secular Society, and the Dialogue between Faith and Reason: Habermas and Contemporary Liberal Theory

During the last two decades, Habermas’s intellectual focus has undergone its latest evolution and, to some degree, deals with elements of the criticism sketched above. Returning to basic questions of political and normative philosophy, Habermas has reflected on the presuppositions of legitimate democratic government at the turn of the century. His writings in this period have focused on the future of the European Union, the problem of nationalism, the onset of globalization, and the dialogue between faith and reason.

Post-Nationalism and Constitutional Patriotism

Habermas acknowledges the legal and social achievements of the nation state, but he is also wary of its tendency to nurture exclusionary ethnic and cultural loyalties that are insulated from rational communicative discourse. While the nation state has consolidated the modern republican ideal of citizenship—by constitutionally enshrining the doctrines of “popular sovereignty” and “human rights”—its long-term sustenance depends on “pre-political” resources that can bind citizens into a community, and this “gap” has historically been filled by nationalism. Relations of nationhood, according to Habermas, are relations of affective or emotional identification with the community that is “independent of and prior to the political opinion and will formation of citizens themselves.” Thus, Habermas uncovers a deep ambivalence in the modern nation state and in nationalism, as such: the idea of the nation state is torn “between the universalism of an egalitarian legal community and the particularism of a community united by historical destiny.”

Habermas argues that globalization makes the (re)emergence of nationalism more likely in the new century. The EU nations, in particular, are caught between the cross-pressures generated by economic integration and by an influx of ethnic and religious immigrants. Thus, the European nation states are threatened both internally—by multiculturalism—and externally—by cross-national institutions that deprive the nation state of sovereignty. In this context, Habermas judges that nationalism represents an appealing but dangerous temptation. Its aim to renew social solidarity through a rejuvenated national consciousness threatens to reverse the achievements of modernity.

Habermas believes that the only form of identification with one’s own traditions that is legitimate in the modern period is that of “constitutional patriotism.” Habermas first used this term during an “historian’s controversy” in the late 1980s. The controversy was ignited by the attempt by several historians to produce reinterpretations of German history that sanitized its Nazi past and downplayed the significance of the Final Solution, thus normalizing German traditions and nationalism as objects of patriotic attachment. Habermas strongly criticized this relapse into nationalism: “For us in the Federal Republic constitutional patriotism means, among other things, pride in the fact that we have succeeded in permanently overcoming fascism, establishing a just political order, and in anchoring it in a fairly liberal political culture.” While this type of post-national patriotism will still situate the universal principles “within the context of a particular national history and tradition,” it will also encourage citizens to adopt a “scrutinizing attitude towards one’s own identity-forming traditions.”

Thus, Habermas hopes that constitutional patriotism is robust enough to tap into the civic motivations of citizens without overtly appealing to their cultural, geographic, and historical heritage. Whether such a democratic ethic can nurture a civic ethos of communal attachment and devotion, however, remains an open question.  

The Post-Secular Society: the Challenge of Pluralism & the Dialogue Between Faith and Reason

Habermas’s earlier works did not entirely neglect to systematically engage religion, but they were animated by the assumption that increasing modernization all but guaranteed the “disenchantment” of the world and the replacement of religion with “modern structures of consciousness” rooted in rationalism. During the last two decades, however, Habermas has undergone a significant change of mind.

The starting point of Habermas’s change of heart comes in his reevaluation of the sociological hypothesis of secularization. As we mentioned, Habermas had for a long time subscribed to the Marxist and Weberian assumption (shared by many sociologists, but also by some earlier Enlightenment thinkers) that modernization and rationalization of society would help bring about the religious “disenchantment” of the political world. He now believes that this assumption is no longer rationally tenable: it is challenged not only by the expansionist ambitions of the Islamic revival in the Middle East, but also by the resurgence of politically active Evangelical Protestantism in North America, as well as China, South Korea, the Philippines, and parts of Eastern Europe.

Habermas’s re-thinking of secularization leads him to reevaluate some of the basic assumptions informing normative political theory’s account of the role of religion in public life. Contemporary liberal theorists often embrace John Rawls’s scheme of “public reason” liberalism. Rawls argued that “the fact of reasonable pluralism” that is characteristic of modern societies imposes on believing citizens the duty to translate their religiously based claims into secular, publicly accessible reasons. While Rawls is sometimes ambiguous on whether this “translation” requirement extends to the “informal” public sphere of civil society, or whether its restrictions extend only to the formal deliberations of public officials (in Congress, the Courts, and the Presidency), many have interpreted his reasoning to apply to all forms public deliberation (formal as well as informal) in democracy.

Habermas stakes out a position between those who hold this “exclusivist” position, and those who wish to push liberalism in a direction that is more accommodating of religious contributions. He argues that it would be unreasonable to expect religious believers to uncouple their theological identities from their political principles when they engage in public debate. He concludes that religious citizens should “be allowed to express and justify their convictions in a religious language if they cannot find secular ‘translations’ for them.”

While Habermas seeks to make the informal public sphere more hospitable to religious perspectives than other Rawlsian approaches tend to do, he also insists that the basic principle of separation of church and state demands an “institutional translation proviso,” by virtue of which all legally enforceable decisions must be based on secular (non-religious) grounds. But even here the accommodationist spirit of Habermas’s proposals is explicit, with burdens of cooperation falling on religious and non-religious citizens equally. This process of cooperative is also one of mutual learning: while the believer must seek publicly accessible arguments, the non-believer must approach religion as potentially harboring truths that are relevant for all.

Habermas’s conciliatory effort to make liberalism more accommodating to religious perspectives goes hand in hand with his insistence that philosophical rationalism must remain open to to the normative truth-content of religious faith. According to Habermas, Christian theology made crucial contributions to Western morality, contributions which have been assimilated by philosophy through such concepts as “responsibility, autonomy and justification.” In particular, Habermas singles out the Christian idea of the divine creation of man in the image of God as a particularly important theological concept that has been appropriated by Western moral-political theory through a process of “saving translation:” “The translation of the notion of man’s likeness to God into the notion of human dignity, in which all men partake equally and which is to be respected unconditionally, is such a saving translation. The translation renders the content of biblical concepts accessible to the general public of people of other faith, as well as to nonbelievers, beyond the boundaries of a particular religious community.”

At the same time, however, Habermas acknowledges that philosophy cannot be expected to successfully appropriate the content of religious experience, and that there are inherent limits to the project of “saving translation.”