Habermas's Bastards

The Rogue Philosophers of Right Wing Authoritarianism

The death of Jürgen Habermas on March 14th has occasioned numerous reflections on his life and legacy. Most of these have been admiring or at least respectful, but one, published in Politico, was pretty odd. It was written by Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, who ventured to Frankfurt to study with the great philosopher. First of all it is written in a tone of wistful nostalgia for his student days, replete with irrelevant asides that are meant to establish Karp as both successful with fair specimens of the fairer sex and also a sharp fellow, a born businessman. For example, he writes, “

My knowledge of the language progressed more briskly after I became involved, first professionally and then not long after romantically, with an extraordinarily compelling and beautiful doctoral student at the university

Okay. That’s nice for you. A little further on, he feels the need to remind us of his liaisons, plural as well as his side hustle:

There were diversions, certainly, both professional and romantic.

I developed a side business of sorts, asking German colleagues who made trips to Zurich to bring me back Cuban cigars; the prices and taxes were more forgiving across the Swiss border. I kept half of the cigars for myself and sold the rest to bankers in Frankfurt.

This is a man very much impressed with his own cleverness.

Karp’s picture of Habermas is of a crotchety and even slightly tyrannical doyen who terrorized his students, routinely referred to people as “idiots” and “half-idiots,” and who ultimately declined to supervise Karp’s dissertation, a rejection whose “sting would linger for years.”

I don’t think anyone would doubt that a German philosophy professor of some stature might be inclined to be brusque. Still, the picture Karp paints is very different from the one that emerges from Habermas’s other students and colleagues. They remember someone patient, unpretentious, and generous with his time and intellectual energy. Is it possible that Habermas just didn’t like Karp very much? He certainly didn’t think highly of his work, writing to Karp, “You simply cannot compete with literary critics and theorists [who have recently weighed in on this subject.]” His doctoral dissertation, on the American sociologist Talcott Parsons and Theodor Adorno’s book The Jargon of Authenticity, was ultimately overseen by the sociologist Karol Brede, concerning principally “the human mind’s instinct towards aggression and its implications for our deployment of jargon as a means of exercising power over others.”

Despite the “wounding” of Habermas’s rejection, Karp sucks it up and appreciates the stern superego of an old-time father, so bracing and different from our own saggy times: “And yet it was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.”

But just as telling as the psychological pas de deux with an uninterested mentor figure is the substantive disagreement that Karp hints at with Habermas:

Habermas advocated for what he described as Verfassungspatriotismus, or constitutional patriotism — the view that one could be loyal to a republic while setting aside the more parochial and tribal affiliations that had dominated human history since the advent of the species. A permanent end to a distasteful and unenlightened nationalism in all of its forms, we were assured, was near.

The vision was noble yet, in hindsight it seems clear, strikingly premature and misguided. In 2011, the German magazine Der Spiegel described him as “the last European,” as the continental government for which he had advocated so fiercely came under increasingly sustained assault.

His hope for a sort of disembodied political identity, untethered from the inconvenient particularities of family and culture, represented an aspirational cosmopolitanism that has proven insufficient to animate allegiance in the modern era. Put differently, he believed in the possibility of a purely rational public discourse. I believed, and still believe, such a discourse must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional — and indeed national and cultural — source.

He may yet be vindicated, but I fear not in our time.

As I noted in my review of his book, Karp bitches constantly about euphemism and the tendency to couch one’s language in neutral-sounding terms to avoid giving offense, but he is incapable of expressing himself directly, relying instead on highly abstract verbiage to disguise rather nasty impulses—incidentally, exactly what his thesis diagnoses.

What on Earth can he be talking about here?

The theater of the discourse, for many, became more important than what was happening in the world, which is that the profound successes of the progressive left in the middle part of the 20th century in advancing the interests of an American underclass had descended into a sort of imperial overreach — an obsession with theory at the complete expense of practice and results.

This sounds to me like an extremely opaque restatement of the general tech right thesis: woke, left-wing intellectuals care too much about blacks, women, and the poor at the expense of technological progress.

Habermas believed in civic patriotism because he saw what blood and soil wrought on Germany and the world; Karp thinks them are just the breaks and incidentally a good way to make loads of money. But since his dissertation was still critical of the latent aggression contained in “jargon,” one wonders if Karp’s embrace of nationalism and war was what led to his break with Habermas, or if it was the result of it. Is it all an act of aggression towards the father figure who rejected him?

It’s troubling to reflect that Habermas is the ancestor of not one, but two different lineages of tech-right thought. Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, was deeply influenced by the hardcore libertarianism of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who was also a student of Habermas but hybridized his work with the Austrian school economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The keystone of Habermas’s edifice is the idea that rational argumentation and discourse intrinsically contain the foundations of ethics: the very practice of making claims and giving reasons commits us to treat others as fellow rational beings and equals. While Habermas’s idea is that giving and receiving reasons presupposes the possibility of a constructive and respectful relation to others, Hoppe thinks it first and foremost implies a relationship to ourselves: nothing we argue makes sense unless we own ourselves, our own bodies, and this self-ownership provides a transcendental justification of private property.

This is all very abstract, but you can see what appealed to Yarvin in what Hoppe believes flows from this absolutization of private property. Hoppe is like Shigalyev in Dostoevsky’s Demons, who said, “My conclusion stands in direct contradiction to the idea from which I started. Proceeding from unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited despotism.” The rights implied by absolute self-ownership end for Hoppe with absolute monarchy. For instance, this is how Hoppe talks about his notion of “covenant communities” in his book Democracy: The God that Failed:

In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, ... naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

Or, even more disturbingly:

A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person, but falls instead in the same moral category as an animal — of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a “free good”) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest).

You might say that what Hoppe has essentially done is to invent Nazism from first principles, which is a tantalizing natural experiment for Critical Theorists who posit that fascism is somehow implicit in capitalism, the concept of private property taken to its extreme, or even in the subject-object relation itself. While Habermas strove to get away from the “philosophy of the subject” that created a kind of solipsistic and instrumental relationship between the “I” and the world facing him, Hoppe has embraced this, and it has spat out a truly horrifying system of universal domination. Just as Habermas would’ve predicted!

What’s really striking is something like the entire philosophical course of German Idealism is being recapitulated here: Fichte’s extreme subjectivism and solipsism lead to his embrace, almost invention, of a radical, exclusionary German nationalism: The nation itself simply takes the place of the sovereign “I” Hoppe simply runs the same program with property doing the work that Geist did in Fichte: the self-positing sovereign individual, unable to sustain himself in isolation, discovers that he requires a purified collective vehicle for his actualization and that vehicle requires the removal of everyone whose presence threatens its self-positing purity.

So you might say that Habermas’s bastards both express the recessive gene of German philosophy: rejecting the cosmopolitanism and universalism of reason and instead low-key becoming a Nazi.