He couldn’t speak. After his second operation for a cleft palate, at the age of five, all Jürgen Habermas could make were muffled sounds that almost nobody understood. Of course, it got better with time. But his odd look and odder speech got him bullied and ostracised at school. For the rest of his life, when really excited, he found himself stuttering. He tried to avoid public appearances, especially unsparing television, if he could.
That was difficult, because as Germany’s, and probably Europe’s, most prominent intellectual he was in high demand for decades. It was also difficult because, in his thinking, communication was the key to everything. His vision of an ideal society was one where, rather than rushing to fight each other, citizens would meet in a “public sphere” to address priorities and thrash out their differences. Such a sphere would not be controlled by the state or any other institution. People would be autonomous, free to speak their own minds. Only reason would rule them as they analysed the arguments of others, asking “Why do you say that?” or “Why would you do that?” And the only means of persuasion would be “the pressureless pressure” of the better argument.
He tried to apply that approach to his own academic life, as he moved around the universities of Germany. His philosophy would not fit in any box. He liked Kant for his views on reason as the key to liberty (though he himself saw reason as something more insidious, a mole creeping through underground passageways). Hegel pleased him for his sense of forward motion in history, and Wittgenstein for seeing language as a social tool. He admired the citizen involvement, up to a point, of the ancient Greeks.
The political left was his natural home, though he was no card-carrying member of the Social Democratic Party. When necessary, he rebuked it. His teaching career began and ended at the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University, a school of critical social theory run post-war by Jewish neo-Marxists; he left for a couple of decades because he found them too elitist, too fatalistic (understandably) and not democratic enough, for him.
The health of democracy was his core concern. His social models then and afterwards were the coffee houses of 18th-century Europe. There citizens, informed by the journals and newspapers of the Enlightenment, freely debated the issues that mattered. Out of that, in the next century, grew democratic states. It was a brief flowering, because soon enough this “ideal speech situation” was refeudalised, as he put it, by political parties and commercial media, while citizens were passive consumers. In the 20th century, with the coming of the welfare state, their interests fragmented all the more to defend their own state-given benefits. And time after time, oblivious to the needs of the world as a whole, fist-pumping nationalism kept rearing its head. He was no pacifist. But surely in the 21st century war should have been superseded?
In his world, authoritarianism and nationalism were the two great blocks to human progress. He had close experience of both. His boyhood and teenage years were spent under Nazism, with his father, an economist, joining the Wehrmacht and he himself in the Hitler Youth. Both of them were passive rather than enthusiastic, but they did their bit. During the inevitable war, he helped as a first-aider and anti-aircraft gunner on the Western Front; near its end, he narrowly escaped being called up. The worst, though, was yet to come, with the Nuremberg trials and footage from the concentration camps. Suddenly, every element of Germany’s history was cast in a different light. He realised that he, and all Germans, had lived in a politically criminal system.
The need never to repeat the Holocaust dominated his thinking. Though he was caught up in the student riots of 1968 he was ever a ’45er, not a ’68er. He first sprang to public notice with a spirited attack on Martin Heidegger in 1953 for writing of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness”. (Reasoned argument could be angry, when anger was justified; as it also was, on a lighter note, when he accused Jacques Derrida of “French irrationalism”. They made it up afterwards.) He had no patience with academics who tried to excuse Germany, arguing that other countries, too, had persecuted Jews; no, Auschwitz was exceptional. And it fell to Germany, even if no one else remembered, to keep alive for ever the memory of the Jews it had killed. When he scolded German politicians, it was often for shows of arrogance that suggested Germany saw itself as a disciplinarian in Europe, rather than a country which, for half a century, had had to mend its own reputation.
His great hope, and chief project, for enduring peace was the European Union. People often called him the last European, because he believed in it so strongly. He helped form it and pushed for improvements: a common economic and fiscal policy, a European constitution. Here was an entity beyond individual states, where an “acid bath” of relentless public discourse could build a better future.
Sadly, it did not turn out that way. Critics attacked him for naivety (as well as such out-of-fashion oddities as believing in universal truths). Rationality, he had to agree, was in short supply in the 2020s; most discussions quickly descended to fisticuffs or exchanges of fire. The internet, on the face of it a forum much like a coffee house, was instead a great sea of digital noise that polarised the populace and stupidly distracted it. That would not save democracy, either. Instead, he placed his faith in the ability of humans to overcome, somehow, the crises of the times.
Meanwhile he did not cease to worry on democracy’s behalf. For seven decades he had done so. In dozens of weighty books and in scores of newspaper articles he pleaded for civility, rationality and joint purpose in human affairs. To join in the essential commonality of spoken language was still an effort for him. But there were other ways to speak. ■