ÌÇÐÄTV

I first met Habermas in the winter of 1993 in the northern Polish village of Wierzba, in the Masurian lakes, part of what had once been East Prussia. The Polish Academy of Sciences had a hunting lodge there they used for conferences and meetings and so on a wet Friday morning a coachload of us – academy fellows, graduate students – set off from Warsaw for one of those journeys in Eastern Europe you spend staring out of the window and wondering about the secrets harboured by the dank forests with their silver birches and abandoned gateposts.  It was to be a weekend of philosophy, politics and metaphysics: Friday was abstruse ruminations on Heidegger and Jaspers, a horse and trap along sandy woodland tracks, and massive sausages over a fire; the great man himself arrived on the Saturday, listened politely to our nonsense, and after dinner read his own paper from a handwritten manuscript. At dinner I had chatted with him about British politics and at one point he said simply, ‘you shouldn’t have elected Mrs. Thatcher’, ‘you’ referring to the British people, admonished for having made a collective mistake more than a decade previously.  He wasn’t Brechtian enough to propose that we elect a new British people, nor was he exactly a moralist, but you always felt that he thought that if everyone read the quality press and watched responsible TV news channels, then most people everywhere would choose a framework of law and social policy that was broadly social democratic. You also had the feeling that he would be ready to tell you so at any time of day or night, as he did when I saw him for a second time some years later, after closing time in the bar of the de Montfort Hotel, Kenilworth in 2001. The Social Theory Centre at ÌÇÐÄTV had invited him to talk about Europe, and he had just done so, again on a Saturday evening, before a packed house at the Arts Centre.

Born in 1929, Habermas belonged to the same generation as Günter Grass, Helmut Kohl, Niklas Luhmann and Jozef Ratzinger, and so was old enough to have vivid memories of the Nazi period but young enough to have come to intellectual maturity during the first decade after the war. Helmut Schelsky described the youth of 1945 as the sceptical generation, and praised them for their abandonment of the kind of uncompromising utopianism that had made Schelsky himself - born in 1912 - a Nazi agitator and enthusiast. The skepticism Schelsky was thinking of manifested itself in a retreat into private and family life and a concentration on hard work and making money, and by the mid 1960s West Germany had become a respectable liberal democracy in the eyes of much of the rest of the world.  The student revolutionaries of 1968 though didn’t see it that way: the denazification of the 1950s had really been normalization, a sinking into conformity which left many old Nazis in positions of authority, especially in secondary and higher education. Schelsky saw in the 68ers’ revolt a troublesome reminder of the youthful and destructive enthusiasm that had blighted his own past. 

Seen against the background of these generational upheavals and those that would follow – 1989, German reunification, the Gulf Wars - Habermas’s career was notable for a remarkable consistency of purpose, which placed him at a distance from the professional academic establishment and the fads and fashions of intellectual life in Europe. As with many German scholars the key to this consistency can be found in his first major publication, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere of 1962. By public sphere he meant a domain of debate and discussion lying between private life and politics. A history of its meaning and institutional shape since the 18^th century in the nation states of western Europe and to an extent the United States, the book can be read as a warning both the generation that reacted to the Nazism of their parents and grandparents by retreating into privacy, family life and business, and to the younger student generation opposed to them, that there was still much to learn about how advanced democracies work. Whatever the students thought about the West German version of it, denazification in both halves of the newly divided Germany had been the work of the occupying powers, not internal soul searching or rational public deliberation. Indeed, a few years before Habermas’s book, in the essay in which he made his famous remark about poetry after Auschwitz, Adorno had made a less well-known but more important one, about how the phrase ‘we are not yet mature enough for democracy’ could act as an excuse not to try harder. 

 At the same time, the book marked Habermas’s distance from the critical theory of his one-time mentor. Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis about the entanglement of myth and enlightenment and technology out of control – ‘positivism is mythic fear turned radical’ was its catchphrase – neglected another dimension of enlightenment, embodied in Kant’s idea of overcoming our self-imposed immaturity by having the courage ‘to make public use of your own reason’. As well as the rationality required for the space programme and the careless squandering of the earth’s sources, there was the rationality of reasoned argument and debate, engaged in by individuals able to leave behind their own interests and prejudices. He would pursue this theme throughout his career, drawing on philosophy, sociology and also psychology to work out the extent to which there was both the institutional environment and the set of aptitudes that would allow people to become and stay mature in this way. In Knowledge and Human Interests from 1968 he did backtrack a bit and took seriously the problem of relativism raised by the sociology of knowledge, but he also asked whether, if all knowledge is interest-bound, there was a mode of knowledge driven by an interest in ‘emancipation’. Here he started to move away from a concern with the public sphere in a political sense and develop a more general set of ideas about ‘undistorted communication’, and in one section he seriously considered the psychoanalytic encounter as a possible paradigm of it. This was not quite the way Freud’s work was being taken up by social psychology and culture criticism, and indeed, once the ideal of undistorted communication had been established in his mind, Habermas developed a tendency to read the work of almost everyone through its lens. This would sometimes lead him both to dismiss too readily those whose work he might have found congenial (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity of 1985 he criticized slew of French thinkers for pre- or post-enlightenment backsliding) and to adopt too readily the ideas of those whose work didn’t fit as easily into his system as he believed. In Communication and the Evolution of Society from 1979 for instance he looked to developmental psychology to ask whether there was an evolutionary tendency at work in modern, rationalized and secular societies for the emergence of structures of consciousness such that people would increasingly understand the need for what he called an ‘ideal speech situation’, that is, a model of open, truthful, rational, and sincere communication.  

He asked this question because he thought we need undistorted communication not for conversation, conviviality or compromise, but because decisions should be based on the force of the better argument. This was important because many of the actual communicative situations we find ourselves in are governed by criteria and imperatives which don’t allow the better argument to prevail. The two biggest sources of distortion are money and power, and in his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action from 1981 he hitched more horses to his wagon, notably Durkheim on religion, the pragmatism of Mead and the phenomenology of Schutz, re-describing the problem of distorted communication as ‘the colonization of the life world by systems’. The most obvious such systems were the capitalist economic system and the system of power embodied in the modern state, but there were also systems of expertise such as science and law. On the latter though Habermas was more sanguine: scientific knowledge depended on a co-operative quest for truth, while what Max Weber called the formal rationalization of law provided for standards of equity and due process that were worth taking seriously beyond the confines of law itself.  

From the 1990s on Habermas left systematic social theory behind and turned more fully to political philosophy (as in Between Facts and Norms from 1992) and public debate, mostly on Germany and Europe – he published 44 articles in the journal Merkur alone – before stunning everyone with an enormous history of philosophy. During the last thirty years he engaged with the work of a wide range of other scholars, by now no longer putting them firmly in their place or seeking to fit them into his own system, but in ways wholly consistent with the idea of a republic of letters. That republic is the poorer for his passing.

Charles Turner

Reader in Sociology