Jürgen Habermas’s death prompted me to revisit his books, something I hadn’t done in many years. At a time when even thinkers of his stature risk being forgotten almost overnight, I felt I owed him something like an “anti-tribute” (just as he himself had done to Herbert Marcuse on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth birthday).
At the turn of the century, when I was an undergraduate in philosophy, Habermas was one of the major intellectual figures you had to reckon with, whether you agreed with him or not. Immersed as I was in the alter-globalization movement, his proceduralism struck me as arid and uninspiring. The (Hegelian) intuition that “the unity of reason only remains perceptible in the plurality of its voices” clearly resonated with those of us who came of age in Seattle and Porto Alegre. Yet the framing of the market and the state as inescapable “subsystems” of a modern, democratic life – pathological perhaps, but only ever to be contained by the lifeworlds they ceaselessly colonize – clashed with our conviction that another world, beyond the logic of the commodity, was truly possible.
Later, while writing my thesis on Adorno in the second half of the 2000s, I found myself rebelling against the official (and, to my mind, biased) narrative that Habermas’s so-called “communicative turn” had managed to supplant the dark, irredeemable pessimism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School by replacing the philosophy of consciousness underlying it with language-mediated intersubjective understanding.
In that version of the story, what was partly a strategic overstatement in Dialectic of Enlightenment – namely, that the demythologization of nature through calculation ultimately produces new mythologies (fascism, the culture industry) – is elevated into the key to interpreting early Critical Theory’s take on modernity. This reading overlooks the extent to which Adorno himself (as well as Marcuse) continuously qualified that claim: Enlightenment harbors contradictory potentials; its authoritarian forms are historically mediated, not metaphysically necessary; bourgeois society – or rather, the bourgeoisie – generates emancipatory ideals (liberty, equality, fraternity) while simultaneously blocking their realization, a blockage political and social in nature, not logical. And this contradiction also fuels struggles aimed at expanding the scope of those ideals. Despite the customary readings of his work, Adorno never lost sight of the fact that capitalist society produces tendencies – reification, instrumental reason, colonial structures – that remain open to contestation, however far-fetched that may seem at times and however thoroughly administered the world appeared in his own time.
Habermas’s critique of Heidegger is, in this respect, deeply consonant with Adorno’s own dialectical thinking of the 1950s and 60s. It represents a decisive attempt to rescue modernity from its reduction to a single, monolithic logic of domination. Against Heidegger’s diagnosis of technological rationality as an all-encompassing “enframing” (Gestell), Habermas insists on a differentiation internal to modern reason itself: alongside instrumental calculation, there persists an orientation toward meaning and mutual understanding, and this dialectical structure is what allows modern thought to avoid a one-sided identification with domination and instead grounds its claim to reason (“legitimacy”, in Habermas’s terms) in its own reflexive openness.
Yet this very openness introduces a tension that runs throughout Habermas’s work. In distancing himself from the more “expressivist” currents of the 1960s – above all the legacy of Marcuse – Habermas draws a sharp distinction between protest and critique. Protest, he argues, sharpens experience but does not yet amount to knowledge; critique alone provides the conceptual tools required to grasp social reality. While analytically useful, this distinction risks obscuring the mediated character of experience itself. Expression and analysis are not identical, but neither are they separable in any strict sense: critique emerges from historically formed experience, and experience is already structured by contradictions that demand interpretation.
A similar difficulty appears in Habermas’s treatment of ideology critique. By shifting the focus from historically specific forms of domination to the procedural conditions of undistorted communication, ideology becomes a quasi-transhistorical phenomenon. To be sure, one must not confuse the unmasking of the objective spirit through Ideologiekritik with a theory of society in advanced (or post-industrial) capitalism; yet detached from a substantive critical account of the latter, the critique of ideologies loses its historical sharpness. Here, in any case, the contrast with Adorno is stark, for whom ideology is inseparable from the social totality that produces it.
This divergence becomes most visible in Habermas’s accusation that Adorno’s aphoristic claims – “there can be no right life in the wrong one”, “the whole is the untrue” – amount to performative contradictions. Habermas’s argument is that if one can assert something universally, one already presupposes the validity conditions one denies. Yet consciousness of living within a false totality does not amount to resolving that falsity; on the contrary, it reveals the gap between conceptual totalization and the irreducible “non-identical” that resists it. The “whole” is untrue not because universality as such is impossible, but because actually existing universality – the universality of capital – falsely presents itself as complete.
Adorno once remarked that historical dialectics sometimes grants greater actuality to what appears anachronistic than to what claims contemporaneity through its smooth functioning within existing apparatuses. Few observations better capture the fate of Critical Theory after its classical moment. What is conventionally presented as an advance – a gain in normative clarity, a refinement of moral grammar, an adaptation to democratic institutions, an escape from the aporias of radical negativity – coincides, in crucial respects, with a theoretical regression.
What recedes in Habermas’s recasting of the first generation’s insights is precisely capitalism grasped as a historical totality. In its place emerges a moralized social theory increasingly attuned to the self-descriptions of liberal modernity. The first generation’s stubborn refusal of normative closure – so often dismissed as pessimistic, elitist, or obsolete – appears today in a different light: Adorno’s insistence on non-identity, Marcuse’s wager on historical rupture, even their speculative excesses, read less like relics of a bygone Fordist epoch than like oblique anticipations of a world in which systemic (dis)integration has advanced faster than the concepts designed to legitimate it. What is now labeled anachronistic is precisely what resists translation into the operational vocabularies of governance, law, and moral consensus.
At this point, however, the very tension within Habermas’s own theory – partly obscured by this historical shift – comes into view. As Peter Dews has argued, communicative action contains an “anarchistic” core: in principle, every truth claim is open to challenge, no authority is beyond question, no consensus is final. This radical openness threatens any attempt at stabilization. Habermas’s later turn to law, civil society, and deliberative institutions can thus be read as an effort to render this radical openness socially sustainable, to translate critique into procedures and norms capable of maintaining integration in complex societies.
This translation, however, comes at a cost. By privileging consensus-oriented forms of institutionalization, Habermas ends up domesticating the critical potential his own theory unleashes. The problem, of course, is not institutionalization as such: large-scale oligarchic structures like the European Union tend toward lobbyist mediation, bureaucratic stabilization, and general depoliticization, even when they preserve formal channels of participation, but workers’ organizations (unions, councils, grassroots formations) can, by contrast, function as vehicles of conflict, sites where antagonism is articulated and organized.
The concept of an “oppositional public sphere”, developed by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in critical engagement with Habermas’s work, foregrounds fragmented, experience-based counter-publics rooted in labor and everyday life; arenas that do not aim at immediate consensus but organize and sustain conflict, and within which the working class finds the means to translate its interests, existential aspirations, and insurgent energies into political form. The decisive question then is not whether critique becomes institutionalized, but how: which forms of organization preserve the antagonistic energy of critique, and which absorb it into existing structures of domination.
To sum up: read against the grain, Habermas’s work retains a certain actuality. Communicative rationality produces a standing surplus of critique over any institutional form that seeks to contain it. Yet a “will to stabilization” runs through his thought and surfaces in a number of unfortunate political positions: support for the first Gulf War as a means of consolidating an international rule of law; endorsement of NATO’s intervention in the Balkans not only to halt genocide but to stabilize the Euro-Atlantic alliance; and, finally, a strong defense of Israel’s right to self-defense. In the latter case, Habermas grounds his stance in Germany’s historically constituted responsibility for the singular crime of the Shoah, which, he argues, entails a special obligation to secure Israel’s existence, elevating its right to defense beyond a matter of international law to a morally charged commitment bound up with the preservation of the postwar normative order.
While it is not entirely unfair to say that the refusal of stabilization – let us say, in Adorno’s negative dialectics – threatens to dissolve critique into ineffectual negativity, it should by now also be clear that attempts to stabilize meaning and secure consensus risk blunting critique altogether. The task, then, is not to choose between openness and order, but to sustain forms of social organization in which critique remains both effective and irreducibly unsettling.
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