Reflections on Habermas; Luzzato's "The First Fascist"
Reading, Watching 03.15.26
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The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died yesterday at age 96, fittingly enough, on the same day Karl Marx died. A protege of Theodor Adorno, Habermas was the chief representative of the “second generation” of Frankfurt School critical theorists. While the first generation, like Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, was formed by the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, Habermas was a creature of the postwar era. It should not be surprising, then, that his philosophy lacks the high gloom of his forebears. (Georg Lukacs once quipped that Adorno and his fellows had taken up residence in “The Grand Hotel Abyss.”)
But it seemed as if Habermas was one of the few philosophers in the continental tradition who still believed in reason. His peers included the “postmoderns” Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who, in different ways, did not think we had access to capital T-truth and who believed capital R-reason was merely an effect of systems, not itself self-grounding and self-authorizing. Habermas was heir to the grand system builders of German Idealism, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, but was an eclectic, taking also from American pragmatist thinkers like John Dewey and C.S. Peirce. Although he rejected the radical skepticism—some might say nihilism—that had taken hold of European thought, he was not a reactionary or a conservative; he was modern and democratic, and perhaps the last keeper of the Enlightenment’s flame. In fact, he may have been the most earnest liberal democrat in the whole European tradition. He took seriously the problems raised by the school of suspicion, but he still believed in progress. Modernity, as he once put it in a lecture, was an unfinished project, but one well worth carrying on.
While Kant grounded reason in the universal structure of the individual mind, and Hegel tried to overcome that subjectivism through the self-unfolding of Absolute Spirit, both remained trapped within what Habermas called the “philosophy of the subject” — a framework in which reason is ultimately referred back to a single consciousness confronting the world. Habermas’s move was to relocate reason in communicative practice itself: the validity claims to truth, moral rightness, and sincerity that speakers necessarily raise whenever they make an assertion, legislate a norm, or express themselves. Reason, on this account, is not a timeless metaphysical faculty or a property of any individual mind — it is embedded in the pragmatic structure of language, in the everyday human activity of making claims and holding each other accountable to them. This made for a less arrogant rationalism: rather than legislating from on high, reason was something we were already doing together, and its authority derived not from a Big Metaphysical Being but from the unavoidable presuppositions of genuine dialogue.
That sounds great, but it is little to be found in the present world, where the promise of universal communication seems to be leading to universal unreason, shared madness, and mental debility. If there is rationality to be found, it seems to be the instrumental rationality Habermas critiqued: the calculating treatment of people as mere means, rather than as ends in themselves. I greatly admire Habermas’s project, and I hope to contribute to the democratic public sphere he described, but I must say that I find the intense pessimism of his Frankfurt School predecessors both more bracing and plausible — and I don’t believe that’s for reasons of temperament or taste alone. It’s sad to say, but they seem more of this moment.
He is also not terribly quotable: Habermas also lacks the first generation’s literary panache, so he does not leave behind a legacy of pithy aphorisms. An ungenerous mind might find some cheap irony in the fact that the scholar of the virtue of public speech was not himself much of a wit. He was not Nietzsche, nor did he have any pretensions in that direction. In his commitment to rigor, he may have sacrificed clarity, at least as far as the casual reader is concerned. The book of his I like the most is actually a series of lectures called The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. It’s an attempt to perform his method of “rational reconstruction” on the often recondite thought of the 20th century and contains helpful interpretations and summations of some of the most difficult things ever written. But it begins in the 19th century, with Hegel, the first philosopher to thematize the modern condition and its problems:
