The Habermaster’s Store

The Habermaster was Jürgen Habermas, beloved of the Guardian. Born 1929, died 2026.

For the following tribute, you need to know the tune of ‘The Quartermaster’s Store‘.

There were words, words, big as bloody turds

In the store, in the store.

There were words, words, big as bloody turds

In the Habermaster’s store.

Big words? Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.” Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. “Theory of Communicative Action.” Ideale Sprechsituation. “Ideal Speech Situation.” Und so weiter.

Jürgen Habermas, old German philosopher, derided by Roger Scruton and Raymond Geuss, admired with occasional reservation by at least Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser and James Gordon Finlayson, Martin Jay and Cass Sunstein, and inspiration for the Habermas Machine, is dead. The Philosopher is Dead, Long Live Philosophy.

I want to look at some of the chunter that has surrounded his death.

James Gordon Finlayson, who is a very good writer, academic at Sussex and authority on Habermas (author of an unlikely book called Habermas: A Very Short Introduction), complained after Habermas’s death that everyone on X was forgetting to respect the dead. Well! Finlayson forgot that the spirit-of-the-age waits for no dead man, and that apart from obsequies and obituaries we must now have the eviscerations and eliminations, as everyone, immediately, and in passing, registers a bit of irritation with whatever affliction the now dead caused in the still living.

So here is a late obituary reflection on Jürgen Habermas, which I shall construct by reflecting on the obituary reflections of others, and adding some of my own. What makes this interesting for me is that Habermas was a political theorist of sorts, that is, a trader in my business, and yet I got almost nothing from him. I never liked or felt any enthusiasm for Rawls, but I saw the point, or the trick, of Rawls, whereas with Habermas I saw no point and no trick: only a sort of extremely long-lived and long-winded persistence. Structural Transformation? Aye, alright: really, just Anglophile Liberal maunder. Theory of Communicative Action? No. Between Facts and Norms? Lent it permanently to a friend.

Habermas was famous for a scenario called the ‘Ideal Speech Situation’. This was a situation in which people would engage in reasoned respectful exchanges in order to decide what is was best to do. (Perhaps this limited what they could say, perhaps it did not.) This has been known to humans since at least Plato. But Habermas felt he had to stick a label on the damn thing, and made it into a political aspiration. So he was a Liberal, then: which means the sort of person who expects every bit of actual politics to resemble a Platonic dialogue and not a Thucydidean one. But he was also, perhaps, a Marxist: since he seemed to be, and for me this is very obscure, a second generation, biting-the-hand-that-fed-him, Frankfurt Schooler. I only know about this because Raymond Geuss, who was one of the few obviously independent minds in the University of Cambridge in the late 20th century, wrote a book kicking Habermas in the shins for having got Adorno wrong. And Geuss caused a kerfuffle a few years ago when he wrote a celebration for Habermas’s 90th birthday in which he repeated his charges.

This piece came out in June 2019 in The Point. Geuss said that Habermas ignored power. He suffered from the strange delusion that “to speak is to be committed to coming to (ideal) moral agreement with the person to whom one is speaking”. He followed Kant in asking about law, not power. It caused much controversy. Benhabib and Jay spoke out. In August 2019 Geuss wrote again, this time for Verso in a blog post, in order to try to explain to himself why Habermasians were so annoyed by derision of their Master. Let me summarise:

• Habermas knew about Marx, but was ignorant of Rimbaud, Nietzsche and Freud.
• Since the Frankfurt School = communism + aesthetics + perspectivism + psychoanalysis, this meant Habermas was in no position to criticise the Frankfurt School.
• Habermas has a trick, whereby he talks about rules and principles, which are transcendental; this sounds mighty, but if one translates what he is saying into ordinary English this amounts to saying trivial or banal things in a very loud voice.
• Public philosophers, including Habermas, should be available for criticism.
• Oddly, some bad philosophers, like Habermas, become icons for academics, perhaps because their books are long and require such an investment to master that one is exhausted afterwards, or perhaps because they support the established liberal order.

This is all very salutary and amusing. I would add to this that the Frankfurt School was rubbish from beginning to end, and that it was dignified by exile and the exoticism it brought to boring American intellectual life in the middle of the 20th century; and that Geuss himself seems a bit too happy about a Whiggish history in which everything interesting he can find in the 19th century ends up with Adorno and, er, Geuss in the 20th century saying that the 20th century is “completely false”.

I should say, in passing, that I like Geuss: I read all his books, no matter what, and know him a bit from my time at Cambridge. I once asked him for a reference while I was applying for a post in Cambridge and he sadly but in retrospect absolutely correctly told me I would be happier if I remained in Bilkent. I reviewed his book Changing the Subject very favourably. But his thought is mired in sad old Leninist musings, and, for all his complaints about liberalism, he seems very fond of standard liberal positions about, say, climate change and the EU.

James Gordon Finlayson sighed on reading Geuss’s piece and accused him of being disingenuous for not having read Habermas since 1980 or so, not noticing that almost all of Habermas’s friends are his critics. I have to quote Finlayson as I think he actually made a mistake:

GEUSS. Rather, Habermas thinks that our liberal political order is basically on the right track: a good thing that should be made to function better. FINLAYSON: No he doesn’t. He thinks it’s gone badly wrong: massive social inequality, impending environmental catastrophe, the resurgence of populist nationalism, and political myopia focused exclusively on re-election all testify to that.

But Geuss is right, not Finlayson. One can think everything that Habermas thought is wrong about the performance of the liberal political order and still think it good: whereas Geuss thinks it is bad.

Finlayson says Geuss is a 68er, while Habermas is a more serious 45er. Well, perhaps. I think this explains Habermas’s attitude to Gaza (not knee-jerkingly anti-Israel), which has appalled Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib and others. (In passing, I should perhaps tell you that Geuss thinks that the state of Israel should be moved to Illinois: a rather wooden bit of Swiftianism.)

What else?

Cass Sunstein, who is an alarming figure (he is a theorist of ‘nudge’), tells us that Habermas is a name to say “with a certain tone of voice”, like “Magic, or MJ or LeBron”. Good God. Sunstein then tells us that he was once walking with Rawls, who asked Sunstein who the greatest democratic theorist was, and then answered the question himself: “Habermas.”

More reassuringly, Nigel Warburton says that Habermas was “brilliant, influential and stupefyingly tedious”, which is funny but undeserved, as Habermas was not brilliant, unless by “brilliant” we mean “having the capacity of listening to a lot of academics drone on and then relate their fatuous ideas to each other”. I am not even sure he was influential. His name is bandied about, and people read him, but I wonder if any of his ideas are actually his. His name is a like a great will-o-the-wisp that covered everything in a fog but will dissipate leaving not a wrack behind. Habermas certainly drilled through hard boards. I remember reading him go on for pages about Foucault when his point appeared to be something that MacIntyre had said in less than one page. (N.B. Habermas sat in a chair which had last been occupied by MacIntyre and astonishingly declared, “I must admit that I have always found MacIntyre very boring.” This story is told to us by Mark Dooley, whom I only knew as literary executor for Scruton. I am now scared of this panopticonic hanger-on: Dooley tells us Habermas and MacIntyre sat in his chair, and that he dined with Derrida. I wonder if he asked all of them if he could be their literary executor too.)

Habermas suffered in full from the distinctive German afflatus: the Marxian habit of writing one, two, three volumes of Das Kapital, the Magic Mountain habit of droning on for aeons, the Boehme, Hegel, Spengler habit of mixing up the bloody obvious with the absolutely bloody preposterous, the German functionary’s inability to be anything other than boring and lengthy. I think someone removed the delete button from Habermas’s PC. Before that, no one introduced him to scissors or tippex, or put any coagulating agent in the ink coming out of his pen. And he obviously hit some very boring but absolutely necessary sweet spot, let’s call it the H-spot, which everyone wanted to have hit, exactly because he droned on from the earnest Left shading into respectable Liberalism. He told the Americans in German-accented English that Germany should be more American-English. It was all very Federal Republic and Marshall Plan. I have no doubt that he was less objectionable than many of the other people afflicting the universities after the 1960s. But this is not much of a recommendation. Anyhow, he was gilded; he worked the net; his name became legend; he became a crony of Rorty, Derrida, and Pope Benedict, and that was that.

The Guardian tells us that it was fond of the Habermaster because he spoke about rationality, inclusivity and other boring ideals of the privileged Centre Left. “Philosophical sustenance for illiberal times.” But all this philosophical sustenance is very confusing. Just when Geuss convinces us that Habermas was a Kantian bore, Jeremy Telman pops up to tell us a story in which American statue Robert Dworkin defended universal moral truths in a seminar, whereupon Habermas (with “his habitual, misshaped grin”, odd way of putting it) said (“radiating joy”) that the Marquis de Sade would call an act of intentional cruelty a celebration. Geuss might quite like that. And then there is the fact that Scruton would have thought all of them, probably even Dooley, were frauds, fools and firebrands of the Left.

Habermas won lots of prizes. He won the Hegel Prize, the Adorno Award, the Leibniz Prize, the Jaspers Prize, the Erasmus Prize, and too many others to list, plus, finally, in 2024, the Johann Skytte prize, which we are told is unofficially the Nobel for political science. It was won mostly by American political scientists like Robert Dahl and Francis Fukuyama, though Habermas eventually elbowed his way into it. I am a bit puzzled as to why he did not win the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, which Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer – regime philosophers of the last century – and others have enjoyed. He did reject one prize from the United Arab Emirates, but only after he received a bit of online chastisement about accepting a prize from such a dubious regime. Regime philosophers have to pick and choose their regimes quite carefully.

He was probably a nice man: I am willing to take this from Martin Jay. He was loyal to his long-lived wife, a distinct merit in one of his generation. But he was dull and wrong, and I can only imagine that he felt obliged to think through the bloody obvious and try to make it seem inevitable. Here is an example of his prose style. I found it on p. 356 of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (though it could have been from any page) but I tremble somewhat at the thought of typing it out:

The options are determined by the logic of a politics adjusted to the system imperatives of economy and state. The two media-steered subsystems, which constitute environments for one another, are supposed to be intelligently attuned to one another – and not simply to reciprocally externalise their costs so as to burden a total system incapable of self-reflection. Within the scope of such a politics, only the correctly dosed distribution of problems as between the subsystems of state and economy is in dispute.

Habermas made even Nietzsche boring. I suspect Habermas was celebrated only because he satisfied the late 20th century desire to fill the intellectual space with vast and capaciously earnest vacuity, political solemnity and ultimately empty self-and-other-and-world importance. Habermas was basically a cross between 1. John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’, 2. Hegel’s Encyclopaedia and 3. a former Nazi Youth who became a very benevolent Geppetto figure, making his wooden marionettes speak to each other in a sort of Esperanto-Meccano of Ideal Euro-Liberalism.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.