The death of Jürgen Habermas closes the life of one of the most influential intellectual figures of postwar Europe. For more than half a century his name stood at the center of debates about democracy, rationality and the public sphere.
Few philosophers shaped so decisively the language through which Western Europe interpreted its own political legitimacy after 1945.
But respect for the dead does not require silence about the political meaning of a thinker’s legacy. If anything, the passing of such a figure invites precisely the opposite: a sober assessment of what his ideas ultimately represented. And in the case of Habermas, the trajectory of his thought reflects a broader transformation that marked much of Western critical theory in the late twentieth century — the gradual shift from a radical critique of capitalist society toward a refined philosophical reconciliation with the institutions of liberal capitalism.
Habermas began his intellectual career within the orbit of the Frankfurt School, a current that emerged in dialogue with the critique of capitalist society developed by Karl Marx. The earlier figures of that tradition wrestled with the great catastrophes of the twentieth century — fascism, world war, the defeat of revolutionary movements in Europe — while still insisting that capitalist society was structured by deep material contradictions. Their work, however complex philosophically, never fully abandoned the insight that the modern world was shaped by relations of production, by class antagonisms and by struggles over economic power.
Habermas gradually moved away from that terrain. In his work the center of social critique shifted from material relations to discourse, from production to communication, from class conflict to the conditions of rational dialogue within democratic institutions. This move was presented as a philosophical advance — an attempt to rescue the ideals of reason and democratic legitimacy from the wreckage of twentieth-century history. Yet the political consequence of this shift was unmistakable: the structural antagonisms of capitalism receded from the center of analysis.
In place of class struggle appeared a theory of communicative rationality, developed most systematically in his major work The Theory of Communicative Action. In that framework the central problem of modern society became the distortion of dialogue rather than the persistence of exploitation. Social conflict did not disappear, but it was reinterpreted as a failure of communication rather than as the expression of fundamentally opposed material interests. The revolutionary horizon that once animated the critique of capitalism was quietly replaced by a procedural faith in the self-correction of liberal institutions.
There is an undeniable moral appeal in the idea that societies might resolve their conflicts through rational debate. But the weakness of this perspective becomes evident when confronted with the realities of modern class societies and the structures of power that sustain them. Capitalism does not reproduce itself through misunderstandings that could be resolved by better conversation. It reproduces itself through property relations, through the control of production, through the power of states and through the global hierarchies that structure the modern economy.
The factory, the corporation, the financial system, the military alliance — all these institutions do not operate according to the norms of rational dialogue. They operate according to interests embedded in the organization of economic and political power. To replace the analysis of these structures with a philosophy centered on communication risks transforming the critique of society into a moralized and abstract conversation conducted within the boundaries of the existing order.
This theoretical shift also marked a decisive departure from the method of historical materialism that had once shaped much of twentieth-century social theory. Historical materialism begins from the recognition that societies develop through contradictions rooted in the organization of material life — in the way production is structured, in the relations between classes and in the struggles that emerge from those relations. Political institutions, legal systems and ideological frameworks evolve in interaction with these material conditions.
Habermas increasingly replaced this perspective with a narrative in which social development appeared as a process of normative learning, a gradual rationalization of institutions through law, discourse and democratic procedures. History was no longer primarily a field of social struggle but a process of institutional refinement. The conflicts that had once driven radical political thought — between labor and capital, between imperial centers and subordinated regions — faded into the background.
The political implications of this evolution became particularly visible in moments when the realities of international power intruded upon philosophical reflection. At such moments Habermas repeatedly aligned himself with the idea that the liberal order of the West represented not merely one political system among others but the normative horizon of modern political development.
This stance became unmistakable in 1999 during the bombing of Yugoslavia by the imperialist military alliance of NATO. While many critics viewed the intervention as a dangerous precedent — a war conducted without international authorization and justified in the language of humanitarianism — Habermas offered a philosophical defense of the operation. In his essay “Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border between Legality and Morality,” he argued that the intervention could be understood as part of a transition toward a cosmopolitan order in which human rights might take precedence over traditional notions of sovereignty.
The argument was elegant. It was also profoundly revealing. Once the actions of powerful states are interpreted primarily through the language of universal norms, the asymmetries of global power risk disappearing from view. Military interventions undertaken by dominant states begin to appear not as expressions of geopolitical interest but as morally motivated efforts to uphold humanity itself.
Yet the modern history of imperialism has repeatedly demonstrated that such language often accompanies the projection of power rather than restrains it. When bombs fall in the name of civilization, human rights or democracy, the victims experience the same destruction regardless of the vocabulary used to justify it. Philosophical refinement does not soften the impact of high explosives. The rhetoric of humanitarian war does not rebuild the bridges, factories and homes reduced to rubble.
Habermas’ support for the intervention in Yugoslavia therefore revealed more than a controversial political judgment. It exposed the limits of a philosophical framework that had gradually detached itself from the analysis of imperial power. Once the structural dynamics of global capitalism recede from view, the actions of the most powerful states can appear as ethical dilemmas rather than as expressions of geopolitical dominance.
A similar perspective shaped his interpretation of the end of the socialist systems in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Habermas famously described the counterrevolutionary upheavals of 1989 as a “rectifying revolution,” a historical correction that reconnected those societies with the political traditions of the bourgeois revolutions and with the constitutional frameworks of Western Europe. The implication was clear: the liberal-capitalist order represented not simply one possible arrangement of modern society but the normative endpoint toward which history itself was moving.
Such a conclusion could only follow from a framework in which the contradictions of capitalism no longer appeared as historically decisive. Once the revolutionary critique of the system had been replaced by a philosophy of procedural legitimacy, the horizon of political imagination narrowed considerably. The task of politics became not the transformation of social relations but the improvement of the institutional and communicative conditions under which those relations were managed.
None of this negates the intellectual seriousness of Habermas’ work. He remained throughout his life a formidable scholar, deeply engaged with the traditions of European philosophy and genuinely committed to the idea that human societies should strive toward forms of political life guided by reason rather than coercion. His insistence that public debate and democratic legitimacy matter is a reminder of aspirations that remain essential in any emancipatory politics.
Yet the lesson of his intellectual trajectory lies elsewhere. It illustrates how easily the critique of capitalism can be absorbed into the ideological framework of the liberal order once the analysis of class power and imperial domination is displaced by the language of norms and procedures. The vocabulary of emancipation survives, but its political content gradually dissolves.
Habermas did not shout in defense of the system; he did something far more consequential. He provided it with a sophisticated philosophical language through which it could present itself as the embodiment of reason, legality and universal values. In that sense his work performed a function that the defenders of power have always needed: it translated the realities of domination into the moral grammar of legitimacy.
With his passing, a towering figure of contemporary European philosophy leaves the stage. His writings will continue to be studied in universities and debated in political theory for many years to come. But the deeper question raised by his legacy remains unresolved: whether critical thought will remain confined to refining the moral vocabulary of the existing order — or whether it will once again confront the material structures of power that govern the modern world.
For if history teaches anything, it is that systems built on exploitation and imperial hierarchy are not overcome by better arguments alone. They are overcome when the social forces subjected to them acquire the power to change the world itself.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
