Colm O’Cinneide, UCL
When Jürgen Habermas died on 14th March last, it felt like the end of an era. On an individual level, his death concluded his long career as an emblematic maître à penser, whose work has exerted great influence over intellectual debate in Europe and beyond for half a century. (A remarkable time-frame, especially considering how such debates thrive on a constant churn of reputational revision.) But, on a wider level, it also could be viewed as marking the closing of a particular historical epoch: namely the post-1945 project of (re)constructing democracy in Europe and elsewhere on intertwined liberal and social democratic foundations.
A philosophy for guiding the (re)construction of democracy after WWII
Habermas’s work is inextricability associated with this process. Indeed, he is often viewed as the thinker who set out the best developed account of the professed aims, ambitions and underlying normative commitments of this new ‘democratic age’,[1] while also critiquing many of its blind-spots and shortcomings as it evolved through the divisive years of decolonisation, the Cold War and then the post-1989 era of apparent liberal hegemony. But now this democratisation project is beleaguered. Electoral unrest, new economic and security challenges, and the slow erosion of the public sphere on which Habermas placed so much value are all undermining faith in the results of post-1945 reconstruction. Which begs the question of what Habermas has to say to us now, after his death. Is he still relevant, in a changed world?
To answer this question, it may help to go back to the early days of the reconstruction project. This was a radical process: much more ambitious and wide-ranging than is often assumed to be the case today, when a certain sense of staleness has crept into popular perception of what was achieved in the post-war era. Starting in Europe and North America, and gradually extending more globally, established state structures were rebuilt on a foundation of mass electoral participation and a commitment to formal equality of citizenship. These newly created mass democracies were buttressed by a dramatic expansion of state social protection and accompanying Polanyian measures to tame the rule of capital. New transnational governance structures were also established, which were designed to further inter-state co-operation and encourage the growth of a more cosmopolitan sense of common belonging.
However, building all this new political, legal and socio-economic architecture was not a straightforward endeavour – especially when the background context of decolonisation and the Cold War was taken into account, not to mention persistent political contestation along the left/right axis. Navigating the new era generated demand for new conceptual thinking, to serve as a guide to the dynamics of mass democracy.
The gap
Such intellectual ballast was initially lacking. In the immediate post-war era, established modes of philosophical and sociological analysis were largely wedded to liberal individualism, and lacked a social dimension that went much beyond Hegelian abstraction – or, alternatively, were essentially negative in orientation, useful for generating ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’ in both left-Marxist and right-Schmittian registers, but not so apt for playing a positive if critical role in the incremental and necessarily negotiated process of building liberal/social democracies out of the rubble of what had gone before.
Habermas helped to fill that gap. In tandem with Rawls and others, he offered a new way of thinking about how democracies could and should function in a way that would legitimise their claim to rule. However, his intellectual project also had a more pronounced critical edge than many of his counterparts – in part because of how it fused the critical Marxist heritage of his Frankfurt School predecessors with revitalised elements of Neo-Kantian conceptual and ethical critique, and thus opened up a way of thinking critically about both the deliberative values of democratic societies and also how such values might be undermined, corroded or nullified within existing conditions of liquid modernity.
In other words, Habermas set out to resuscitate Enlightenment rationality and turn it into a positive tool that could help in the post-1945 process of constructing suitably social and decommodified liberal democracies. And, despite the density of his writing and thinking, his ambition struck a chord – as did the rigour of his argumentation, and the new ways of thinking about democracy that it opened up for others to take forward.
Indeed, Habermas was arguably the thinker who grappled with the promise and contradictions of the post-1945 liberal/social democratic Zeitgeist to a greater degree than any of his contemporaries. In particular, by mapping out how intersubjective communication and learning should function in democraticising societies, he was also able to set out a critique of how this promise might fall short – and be overtaken by more instrumentalist and distorted modes of rationality.
This made him sensitive to the limits of institutionalist analysis, which often obscure the clash of competing rationalities that can play out across the full spectrum of state structures. Thus, by way of example, contrast Rawls’s rather thin writing on constitutionalism and judicial review with Habermas’s superb analysis of the inherent – and his exploration of the ways in which this tension can be structured and channelled in constructive ways without closing off the claims of democratic self-determination.[2]
The social dimension and the risk of exclusion
Furthermore Habermas, unlike most liberal-orientated philosophers of his generation, was throughout his career profoundly concerned with the need to reinforce the social dimension of democratic state-building – and feared the potential of instrumental market rationality to overwhelm the collective, care-orientated and inter-relational forms of communicative activity which he labelled as the ‘lifeworld’. This aspect of his thinking was often ignored or overlooked by his more conventionally liberal interlocutors, especially in the Anglo-American world. However, in his superb contextual account of Habermas’s intellectual trajectory, Matthew Specter has emphasised how central this concern with the social dimension of democracy was to his thinking.[3]
Habermas also had a healthy awareness of how communicative power structured and exercised within political, legal and administrative systems can lock out alternative forms of lifeworld-originating rationality.[4] In other words, he was aware of the potential for democratic structures to close themselves off to particular perspectives – which in turn made him suitably sceptical of demands that democratic deliberation be structured in unduly narrow or exclusionary terms. A good example of this was his nuanced and sympathetic analysis of the legitimacy of appeals to religious belief made within the framework of public discourse, written for the most part in the aftermath of 9/11, i.e. a good four decades after he first mapped out the concept of the ‘public sphere’.[5] This put to shame much of the simplistic writing about secularism produced before his intervention, especially in Europe. And it showed how Habermas’s critical theory was alive to the multiplicity of lifeworld perspectives that exist, and the concern that established democratic structures might operate in ways that can close down genuine deliberation.
Taken as a whole, Habermas’s intellectual project thus mapped out a normative trajectory for the new post-1945 democratic order, while also identifying potential threats to its healthy functioning. And this combination of positive norm-construction plus critical cutting-edge gave his work a potency that others lacked. Other factors also played a role in his intellectual ascendancy from the 1960s on, ranging from the place he occupied in the Frankfurt School genealogy to his openness to the possibility that a shared European identity could be constructed on the basis of shared attachment to universal legal-political norms. But, ultimately, his place in the intellectual firmament was secured by how his intellectual project matched the felt need for a philosophy that could give adequate articulation to the normative possibilities of the new democratic era – while also providing a critical framework to critique its failures.
What now?
So, what are we to make of Habermas’s philosophy at the current moment, when the post-war democratisation process has entered crisis mode? Does Habermas’s articulation of the normative potential of deliberative democracy still resonate, when the actual reality of liberal democracies is proving to be so disappointing for so many? Conversely, does the critical dimension of his theorising still have potency, when it comes attached to an account of rational communicative action that sits uncomfortably with the fevered polarisation of so much contemporary political debate – much of which is generated by root and branch disagreement about the very contours of rationality that Habermas assumes can provide a structuring frame for civic discourse?
Some commentators have been persistently critical of what they see as the unduly idealistic/Kantian streak in Habermas’s philosophy, and the excessive faith it invests in communicative rationality to generate just and legitimate social outcomes.[6] Others, such as Nancy Fraser and Samuel Moyn, have suggested that the critical edge of his thought was blunted by his tendency to take the established contours of currently existing liberal democracy as his normative reference point – resulting in a certain blindness to the persistence of structural power imbalances in the status quo.[7]
There is some justice in these criticisms – even if they tend to overlook the extent to which Habermas remained for his whole career a persistent critic of the embedded power of instrumental market rationality, and set out a sustained critique (as already mentioned) of the exclusionary nature of many forms of state-centred ‘deliberation’. Addressing the erosion of democracy in our current moment may require us to go beyond Habermas, and look more deeply at how deliberative democracy can and should work in actually existing contemporary societies. It may also require fresh engagement with how we conceive of ‘rationality’, and what meaningful inter-subjective recognition should entail in political contexts like ours where the public sphere has become so corroded and distorted by private power. However, at the end of the day, it is likely that we will keep coming back to Habermas, even as an argumentative foil – because he remains the thinker who has probed deepest into the normative potential of democracy, while also grappling with its contradictions.
Colm O’Cinneide is Professor of Constitutional and Human Rights Law at University College London (UCL) and Vice-Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Laws.
Note: The views expressed in this post are those of the authors, and not of the UCL European Institute, nor of UCL.
Photo: A sealed ballot box in the 2024 Swedish European Parliament elections at Stångenässkolan, Brastad. By W.carter, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
[1] M. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age 1945-1968 (Princeton UP, 2000).
[2] See in particular his concise analysis of this tension in J. Habermas, ‘Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?’ (2001) 29 Pol. Theory 766.
[3] M. Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (CUP, 2006). See also S. Klein, The Work of Politics (CUP, 2020), 129-170 – an excellent analysis.
[4] For an interesting critique of Habermas’s views in this regard, see O. Gerstenberg, ‘Radical democracy and the Rule of Law: Reflections on J. Habermas’ legal philosophy’ (2019) 17(4) International Journal of Constitutional Law, 1054–1058.
[5] See e.g. J. Habermas, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’ (2006) 14(1) European Journal of Philosophy 1-25.
[6] See e.g. R. Geuss, A Republic of Discussion | The Point Magazine, 18 June 2019.
[7] N. Fraser, ‘After Habermas’, London Review of Books, 25 March 2026.
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