Jürgen Habermas

Habermas’s starting point was democracy. In his preface to Student and Politics (1961), a joint study of German students’ political attitudes, he defined democracy above all by political participation: it becomes true when mature citizens, under the conditions of a functioning public sphere, take the arrangement of their social life into their own hands. In the modern constitutional state, he argued, the centre of gravity had shifted from parliament to the administration and the parties, the public had fallen by the wayside, and the citizen had been given the status of a “customer” who pays the bill at the end.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, his habilitation thesis published in 1962, traces historically how the public sphere arose and decayed. The public sphere is a space outside state control where private individuals come together to debate public matters. From the mid-seventeenth century, in coffee houses, salons and table societies, people discussed first art and literature and soon economics and politics; within these circles equality and the force of the better argument prevailed. Unlike the “representational” culture of the monarchy, which, like the palace of Versailles, only displayed the ruler’s greatness, the public sphere was made of dialogue and criticism. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, sharpened capitalist competition drew publicity into the pull of particular interests. Commercial mass media turned the critical public into a passive consuming public, and communication narrowed under the influence of a few large investors. Habermas called this the “refeudalization of the public sphere.”

His main work, The Theory of Communicative Action, published in two volumes in 1981, sought to lay a new foundation for critical theory. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno had seen rationalization as such as a disastrous process in human history. Habermas limited that negative verdict to “instrumental rationality,” which disposes over objects and people, and set against it a “communicative rationality.” Actions can be coordinated in two ways: by “strategic action,” which influences others in order to reach one’s own ends, and by “communicative action,” which aims at mutual understanding and agreement. In communicative action a speaker raises at once the claims that what is said is true, that it is right by the standards of the norms involved, and that it is sincere, and the hearer can accept or contest those claims. Reason, he argued, lives in this process of arguing with reasons.

To this he added a two-level theory of society, “system” and “lifeworld.” The lifeworld is the everyday horizon in which people understand one another through language; the system is the market economy steered by money and the bureaucratic state steered by power. In modernity the system split off from the lifeworld and became independent, and now the imperatives of money and power penetrate areas that can only be sustained through mutual understanding. Habermas called this the “colonization of the lifeworld.”

From the 1950s Habermas had argued for democratic reform of education and the universities, and as a representative of the “left” he was one of the intellectual stimulators of the student movement of 1967–1968. From the spring of 1967, professors and student activists at West German universities increasingly accused each other of “fascism.” On 2 June the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a policeman at a demonstration in West Berlin; after his funeral in Hanover on 9 June, the Socialist German Student League (SDS) held a congress there.

At the congress Rudi Dutschke called for “action centres” at West German universities. Habermas declared his solidarity with the students and called the West Berlin police action “terror” meant to deter future protests. But he told the students that they should first analyse society thoroughly, since direct action had little prospect of changing its complex structures. When Hans-Jürgen Krahl objected that the armed state left the students no option but provocation, Habermas replied that systematically pursued provocation by students was “a game with terror (with fascist implications).” Dutschke, the last official speaker, retorted: “Professor Habermas, your concept-less objectivism is beating to death the subject that is emancipating itself.” Since the productive forces of capitalism had made it materially possible to abolish hunger, war and domination, he argued, everything depended on people’s conscious will to control their history.

After Dutschke had left the hall, Habermas returned to the lectern. Dutschke, he said, had in fact proposed only sit-ins, a demonstration with non-violent means, but had built on it a voluntarist ideology which in 1848 would have been called utopian socialism and which under present conditions “must be called ‘left fascism’.” Voluntarism is the view that human will, rather than the objective conditions of society, changes history. He asked Dutschke to make clear whether he was deliberately provoking manifest violence and accepting the risk that people would be injured.

Habermas did not equate action centres or sit-ins with fascism. His target was the theoretical justification that expected social change from the will of revolutionaries alone, the same reasoning by which Marx had criticized utopian socialism for ignoring the economic development of society. He feared that provoking the state with illegal actions could call forth the fascism latent in the structures of society before the forces of change had any chance of success, a fear grounded in critical theory’s account of fascism as the consequence and latent threat of liberal capitalism. The remark nonetheless provoked a strong backlash, and he later regretted the choice of words. In West Germany the term “left fascism” was afterwards used mostly to defame left-wing groups. In 1969 Herbert Marcuse criticized Habermas’s charge in letters to Theodor W. Adorno, who defended Habermas.

On 11 July 1986 Habermas published an article in the weekly Die Zeit, “A Kind of Settlement of Damages,” attacking the writing on the Nazi era of historians such as Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer, Klaus Hildebrand and Andreas Hillgruber as “apologetic.” In his view they tried to detach Nazi rule and the Holocaust from the mainstream of German history, to explain Nazism away as a reaction to Bolshevism, and partly to rehabilitate the reputation of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. He called it revisionism to compare Nazism with Stalinism on the same level, or to present Stalinism as the forerunner and model of Nazism. He also charged Stürmer with trying to make German history into a kind of “vicarious religion” and Hillgruber with glorifying the last days of the German army on the Eastern Front.

His concern went beyond the interpretation of history. These historians, he argued, wanted to close Germany’s opening to the West achieved since 1945. Criticizing their attempt to revive the old geopolitics of Germany’s “central position” in Europe, he wrote: “The only patriotism that will not estrange us from the West is a constitutional patriotism.” Constitutional patriotism means basing the community not on nation or descent but on loyalty to the values of a democratic constitution.

The article provoked fierce reactions and opened what became known as the historians’ dispute. The debate was not one-sided: Joachim Fest, Hagen Schulze, Horst Möller, Imanuel Geiss and Hildebrand attacked Habermas, while Martin Broszat, Eberhard Jäckel, Hans Mommsen and Hans-Ulrich Wehler supported him.

Habermas kept intervening in public debate. He criticized German reunification in 1990 as an administrative procedure tailored to economic imperatives, without a democratic dynamic of its own. He saw the constitutional amendment restricting the right of asylum at the end of 1992 as an expression of “welfare chauvinism,” opposed it in print and joined some 350,000 demonstrators in Berlin on 8 November 1992.