- An outlier, not a verdict: Habermas’s signature on the “solidarity with Israel” statement reflected a misunderstanding of his own ideas, not the culmination of his thought.
- Schmitt’s logic, not his own: Reason of state (Staatsräson) belongs to the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose sovereign exceptionalism Habermas spent his career opposing.
- A generational blind spot: Like many West Germans shaped by the Third Reich, Habermas shielded the Israeli state from the very scrutiny his universalism demands.
- The order he built: His work on global governance helped lay the foundations for the ICJ now weighing whether Israel’s acts fall within the Genocide Convention.
- Needed most now: As Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu dismantle the rules-based order, Habermas’s multilateral, communication-based politics offer rare democratic resources.
On 14 March, the West German philosopher, sociologist, and public intellectual Jürgen Habermas passed away just a few months before his 97th birthday. Over the course of his long life, Habermas indelibly shaped the postwar order, both intellectually with his path-breaking work on the public sphere, the concept of communicative action, and global governance, and politically with his interventions into the politics of memory, his advocacy for the development and democratisation of the European Union, and his commentaries on contemporary political issues ranging from genetic engineering to the war in Ukraine.
While Habermas sought to maintain a separation between his role as a researcher and what he once referred to as the “shirt-sleeved mode of a noisy, argumentative conflict of opinions in the public arena,” his public-facing interventions often got him into trouble. Given that he expressed little interest in mellowing his often provocative views by “wrapping enraged citizens (Wutbürger) in protective gauze,” this is perhaps unsurprising. Throughout his career, Habermas repeatedly placed himself at the centre of political debates and displayed a surprisingly high tolerance for conflict in his desire to improve the quality of public debate as a public intellectual.
Following his death, the media — both in his native German Federal Republic and beyond — has been flooded with tributes and remembrances. In addition to laudations written by his friends and colleagues, a number of politicians have also addressed his legacy from the perspective of his contributions to political debate. Even the president of the German Federal Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, issued a statement noting that Germany “will miss his voice. Our country owes him an incalculable debt.”
Not all of these commentaries were positive. Ironically, while Habermas was always a “red flag for the conservatives,” many of his most forceful posthumous critics have come from within his own camp on the left. While some focused their critiques on his insufficiently revolutionary “radical reformism” and used this opportunity to repeat their critiques of his transformation of the normative foundations of critical theory, one issue loomed over all others: Habermas’s decision to co-sign a statement expressing “solidarity with Israel” following Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
Since Habermas’s death, this signature has repeatedly been used to discredit “Habermas’s intellectual project.” Most prominently, Nancy Fraser notes that although “Habermas first lit my path as a critical theorist…with his stance on Gaza, [his light] seemed to go out.” I share the disappointment with Habermas’s position. However, unlike Fraser and so many others, I do not think that it can simplistically be used to “damn its issuer,” thereby discrediting his philosophy as a whole. Instead, this statement presents us with the opportunity to use the political and philosophical resources of Habermas’s thought to confront the pathologies of the contemporary world beyond his “failure of judgment” on Gaza.
Habermas’s Position on Gaza
As a young student in 1953, Habermas broke into the West German public sphere — which he would decisively shape over the rest of his career — with an article entitled “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger.” In this piece, he took the most prominent living German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who had collaborated extensively with the Nazi regime, to task for reprinting a series of lectures from 1935 without removing a favourable reference to the “inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist movement.
Seventy years later, with Habermas himself now cast as Germany’s most prominent living philosopher, his decision to sign the “Principles of Solidarity” statement on Gaza has provoked similar outrage that threatens to overshadow his legacy. This text appeared simultaneously in both English and German on the website of Normative Orders, a research centre associated with the Frankfurt School, of whose second generation Habermas was the leading voice. It was published on 13 November 2023 — just five weeks after Hamas’s unprecedented terrorist attack on Israel — during a period of growing anti-Semitic violence in Germany, which included the attempted firebombing of a Berlin synagogue.
In light of these events, and the attempts by the German far-right to use growing sympathy for the Palestinians to stoke anti-Jewish hatred, the statement’s claim that “Israel’s actions [in Gaza] in no way justify anti-Semitic reactions” was reasonable. Similarly, given Habermas’s “fear of a political relapse,” he understandably endorsed the assertion that “Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist are central elements [of German identity] worthy of special protection in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi era.”
However, the fact that the statement goes on to claim that Israel’s military retaliation was “justified” and that “the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions” is highly problematic, to say the least. The text, which was co-signed by Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther, and Nicole Deitelhoff, was clearly not written by Habermas himself. However, this does not absolve him of responsibility for affixing his name to it, or for his failure to address this issue again before his death, even though he had ample opportunity to do so, particularly after the vastly disproportionate nature of Israel’s response and the suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians had become clear.
Despite my own disappointment with this statement, neither Habermas’s signature nor his failure to apologise for it represent an indelible stain on his legacy. Unlike Heidegger, whose thought contains fundamentally totalitarian tendencies and who confirmed his intellectual affinity to National Socialism with concrete actions in his capacity as the Nazi-appointed rector of the University of Freiburg, Habermas’s indiscretion is an outlier in his enormous corpus of philosophical and public-facing work devoted to confronting and overcoming the Nazizeit.
Rather than confirming something implicit in his work, I argue that we should treat Habermas’s signature of the Normative Orders statement as an outlier that represents a misunderstanding of the implications of his own ideas. In this sense, just as Habermas did with Heidegger, this intervention presents us with the opportunity to “think with Habermas against Habermas.”
Deploying Habermas’s Tools against Him
In attacking Habermas’s stance on Gaza, his critics often reference Israel’s alleged violations of international law. In particular, many point to the conclusion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that “at least some of the acts…committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention.” If we are going to draw on the findings of the ICJ to condemn Habermas’s support for Israel’s aggression — as we should — then we should also note his profound influence in shaping the postwar project of cosmopolitan democracy and global governance. Habermas’s work on the postnational constellation and the constitutionalisation of international law helped to lay the foundation for the international legal and political institutions that are doing the legwork necessary for the possible (even if unlikely) criminal prosecution of Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow perpetrators in Israel.
Similarly, Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and his conviction that politics can move beyond the nation-state also help us to understand how arguments presented in transnational civil society can shape global public opinion. The conversation about what Habermas’s position on Gaza means for his legacy should thus not end with a statement to which he unwisely attached his name, but with what he should have said in light of the theoretical commitments he consistently maintained in both his philosophical and political writings. This is especially true since this text is based on ideas that stand in tension with the basic commitments of Habermas’s work.
Habermas’s explicit endorsement of Israel is consistent with postwar Germany’s support for the Israeli state as a matter of “Staatsräson (raison d’état).” The concept of “reason of state,” which holds that an exception to the rule of law can and should be made in order to prioritise national interest on key political issues, represents a break with the implications of Habermas’s universalistic critical theory. Rather than being implicit in Habermas’s egalitarian, proceduralistic critical theory, this concept is closely associated with the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work and influence Habermas consistently and vehemently opposed.
For Schmitt, who believed that sovereignty was located in the singular figure of the strong executive leader who is able to “decide the exception,” the concept of Staatsräson is central. By contrast, Habermas’s philosophical commitments to communicatively shared democratic sovereignty based on the right of each to refuse a discursive decision by saying “no” (Neinsagen) specifically precludes the idea that any individual can override the requirements of the legal order. His legal and political theory not only does not allow for Schmittian forms of sovereign exceptionalism; on the contrary, Habermas formulated his theory precisely in opposition to Schmitt’s position, which he saw as dangerous precisely because it helped to provide the legal basis for the Holocaust.
That being said, it is clear that, like many West Germans of his generation, Habermas had a blind spot with regard to Israel. Given that he spent his childhood in the Third Reich and was shocked to learn of the atrocities that had been committed in his name after 1945, his support for the Israeli state and his reticence to criticise its actions are understandable. Speaking in 2012 — when the situation of Palestinians was already bad, but still much better than it is at present — he noted that, while he disagreed with “the policies of the current Israeli government” (also under Netanyahu), he remained convinced that “it is not the role of a private German citizen of my generation” like himself to condemn it.
This was the position he held until his death. Although Habermas’s sensitivity to the particularities of his own positionality is laudable, in this case it undermines his — as well as postwar Germany’s — commitment to international law and the preservation of human dignity, as well as the fight against genocide and the return of fascism. It also undercuts the lessons of the Holocaust if the perpetrator of crimes against humanity (the Israeli state, in this case) is let off the hook for its barbaric acts simply because in the past its people were themselves the victims of a state-sponsored genocide.
The Present Value of Habermas’s Thought
As a public intellectual, Habermas never saw himself as an omniscient purveyor of truth or as an external moral authority. Instead, he understood himself to be playing the role of a Socratic gadfly: a citizen who sought to improve the quality of public debate by ensuring that all positions were given a voice and due consideration, especially those that were not popular. Until the end, he remained convinced that fundamental political reorientations — especially on issues that were the products of historical learning processes, such as German support for Israel — should not occur quickly and reflexively in response to current events, but instead should be carefully debated and considered in the public sphere.
Thinking with Habermas against Habermas — as I have sought to do — reveals how the most influential philosopher of the postwar era was trapped by his own particularistic understanding of what the Holocaust meant for him and for Germany, especially vis-à-vis Israel. By resisting the binary thinking that forces us to see his statement on Gaza as the “culmination of Habermas’s intellectual project,” we can instead appreciate the resources his philosophy provides for thinking beyond his own stated positions. Far from showing why we should no longer read Habermas, this discrepancy demonstrates precisely why we still should, even if this leads us to different conclusions about the implications of his work than he himself drew.
At a time when the postwar rules-based international order is increasingly under attack, Habermas’s pluralistic, multilateral, communication-based view of international politics offers important critical resources. While authoritarian strongmen such as Netanyahu, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin, as well as corporate titans such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, are doing their best to bring about what Habermas referred to as the “’abolition of politics’…[by] a new form of technocratic-authoritarian rule,” for the vast majority of the world’s population contemporary attempts to forge a new world order governed by strength, force, and power can only be seen as a form of democratic regression.
Habermas became increasingly pessimistic in the final years of his life as he watched the dismantling of the postwar world he had worked so hard to create. However, he maintained an optimistic belief that “democracy is capable of hacking through the Gordian knot of otherwise insoluble problems.” Although he noted that he did not “know whether success is possible” given the problems the world is facing today, he concluded, “we still have to try.” It would be a shame if we backed away from the resources Habermas’s work offers us precisely when we need them most, just because he himself misjudged how his ideas should apply to the atrocities that the state of Israel is perpetrating in Gaza today.
