Stuart Jeffries, Jürgen Habermas obituary, The Guardian, 16 March 2026
Philosopher and social theorist who advocated a new direction for German thought after the horrors of Nazi rule
The philosopher, social theorist and defender of humane Enlightenment values Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, spent the last months of the second world war helping to protect the Third Reich. He was 15 and a member of the Hitler Youth. Too young to fight and too old to be exempted from war service, he was sent to the western front to man anti-aircraft defences.
He later described his father, the director of the local seminary, as a “passive sympathiser” with the Nazis and young Habermas shared that mindset. But he was soon shaken out of his and his family’s complacency by the Nuremberg trials and documentaries of Nazi concentration camps.
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His great leftist, Jewish teachers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer philosophised in that rupture. Their student would follow suit. Adorno and Horkheimer had returned from American exile after the war to re-establish the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, and were developing an interdisciplinary way of thinking called critical theory. Adorno, in particular, whose assistant Habermas became in 1956, mused on whether “one who escaped [Auschwitz] by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living”.
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Reason, Habermas maintained, was crucial to clear communication and such communication was a bulwark against fascism. Violence could have no role in that. The Enlightenment, Habermas concluded, continued to have “a sound core”. But in accepting the Enlightenment legacy Habermas was a man out of time – opposed not just by student radicals but by postmodernist thinkers.
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, said: “After the massacres we have experienced, no one can believe in progress, in consensus, in transcendent values. Habermas presupposes such a belief.” Habermas’s book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) defended those values against postmodernists – among them Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
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For background reading on the “debate that never was” between Foucault and Habermas, see
James Schmidt, Foucault, Habermas, and the Debate That Never Was, Persistent Englightenment, 17 July 2013
Foucault News 