Jürgen Habermas has died, just as the world – of which he was, in many ways, a theorist – increasingly resembles, in the words of Stefan Zweig, the “world of yesterday.” Yet when we look at his legacy, Habermas’s ideas and contributions remain highly relevant in many respects. In short: The world would be a different place if we had listened more closely to this humbly towering European thinker.
In my book Tipping Points: From the Promises of the Nineties to the Crises of the Present, I wrote about Habermas, the European – and if we understand the failures of that era, we may not only understand why Europe is in such a dire state, but hopefully we will also see more clearly what we can and must do to achieve a European fresh start – which in this case would likely mean a genuine break with the postwar order upon which the EU was built and on which the European self-image still rests.
Habermas would not have described this new vision as post-liberal or post-Atlantic; after all, he was a child, student, and theorist of that old order. What can be transferred, in a contradictory way, into a post-liberal vision of Europe as a more democratic union are the constitutional ambitions and the radically democratic clarity. And in the face of European helplessness regarding Donald Trump, geopolitical disorientation, German leadership weakness, and AI malaise, his invectives are already sorely missed.
