Theory of the Present

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas died at his home in Starnberg on March 14, 2026, at the age of 96. With his death, we have lost the most important critical analyst of crises in politics and society. The thought of this world-famous philosopher and sociologist was focused on the idea of rational freedom and the public use of reason. As a left-liberal republican, for the whole of his adult life, he not only reminded us of the normative content of democracy and defended it as a public Intellectual but also spelt out in his writings what it consists in.

This essay aims to demonstrate how Habermas combined philosophy and sociology as different but mutually dependent intellectual forms of enlightenment and applied the cognitive principles of the two disciplines in the analysis of the present time.

What drives me is the problem of how a social coexistence that is fragile and has kept tearing apart until now can actually succeed. (Habermas, 2026, p. 6)

With his many writings, translated into over 40 languages, Jürgen Habermas has contributed to the global impact of sociology and thereby both to the identity of the subject and to the continuing worldwide interest in the knowledge contained in the human and social sciences as a whole.¹ The impact of his books, however, reached beyond the scientific community—as reflected not just in his innumerable interviews and frequent dramatic political interventions in internationally influential print media but also in the constantly growing resonance of his wide-ranging work and the critical debates with him.

Even in the formative phase of this project to conceptualize and to develop a social theory that aims to make explicit its critical principles, Habermas was concerned to internalize the specific modes of cognition of philosophy and sociology. In relation to philosophy, he put into practice the aim to specify the conditions of rational freedom, while he incorporated sociology as a historical-critical science with a view to a theory of the present [Gegenwartstheorie], which asks how a social order that is based on agreement is possible. From the beginning, he saw clearly that philosophy and sociology have diverged in terms of their object domain, their methodologies, and cognitive aims. Nevertheless, both the science of enlightenment and the science of crisis contribute, in their own ways, to a linguistic community's understanding of itself and the world and can resist the imperatives of scientism (Habermas, 1963). With the establishment of an emancipatory cognitive interest, Habermas (1968) made a fundamental contribution to this resistance against exclusively causal-analytic and scientifically objectivizing descriptive practices.

On the one hand, he appropriated as a philosopher—along with the traditions of idealism and of Western Marxism and psychoanalysis—philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics as well as, subsequently, the Anglo-Saxon analytic and the pragmatic philosophy of language. On the other hand, he approached sociology as an empirical discipline and during his “apprenticeship” [Lehrjahre] at the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung he got to know the critical theory tradition. Here, he spoke himself of “the weight of a second course of study.” He participated in empirical studies—for example, on social policy and on the political consciousness of students—and was charged with providing a social-theoretic underpinning for these studies. His closeness to Theodor W. Adorno and also his independence in social science are expressed in his contributions to the Positivismusstreit early in the 1960s. With his contributions to this controversy, he embarked on an attempt to clarify the epistemological foundations of the social sciences. Here, he was not only concerned to defend Adorno's postulate of unregulated experience. Rather, his contributions express an exercise in self-clarification about the limits and scope of the hypothetical-deductive methodology of the analytical-empirical approaches. In retrospect, it is striking what an enormous place is occupied here by the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer; the young Habermas attempts to combine the conception of “the hermeneutic explication of meaning” with the dialectical approach to cognition of his respected Frankfurt teacher. This attempt culminates in 1967 in Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (Habermas, 1982), which traces a path for sociology and in which, as he puts it, he undertakes nothing less than to explain the dimension of access through the understanding of meaning to the symbolically prestructured domain of the social sciences (see Habermas, 1982, p. 326). Here, as earlier in his Frankfurt inaugural lecture on Erkenntnis und Interesse, he describes language as a “metainstitution” on which social reproduction depends no less than on the historical state of the labor process and of domination (Habermas, 1982, p. 306f). Habermas differentiates the intrinsic logic of purposive-rational and communicative action, distinguishing between “work” [Arbeit] and “interaction” [Interaktion]. This engagement with Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Émile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons—this tour d’horizon of sociological approaches—already includes in nuce the basic categories of linguistic communication and intersubjectivity, which Habermas was to develop more systematically 14 years later in his principal work, the Theory of Communicative Action.

TCA

In his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Habermas defines society “as a system that has to fulfil conditions for the maintenance of socio-cultural lifeworlds,” and he operates with the concepts of “system” and “lifeworld” (Habermas, 1981, vol. 2: 228; tr. 151–2). Whereas social integration in the lifeworld takes place through communicative processes of mutual understanding, the functional integration of the system consisting of the economy and the state occurs through the causal interplay of the steering media of money and power. Modern societies depend on an efficient economic system with monetary exchange and the effective rule of an administrative system in the form of power organized in a state. This dependence also holds for the “level of implicit knowledge,” that is, for the lifeworld, in which we “always already” [immer schon] find ourselves as subjects capable of speech and action and from which we derive resources of meaning and our intuitive knowledge. The lifeworld as it is rationalized in modernity, with its three structural components—the culturally transmitted value orientations, socially coordinated group attachments and recognized personal identities—is a fragile construct; its symbolic reproduction is highly liable to failure. Habermas emphasizes the danger of a “colonization” of the linguistically shaped lifeworld, whereby the internalized practices of the appropriation of tradition, socialization, and long-tried solidarities can fall apart (Habermas, 1981, vol 2: 522f; tr. 556f). Modernity is in danger of “derailing” if the system mechanisms of economic and administrative rationality become self-sufficient and penetrate everyday domains which fundamentally depend on interaction contexts oriented to mutual understanding. Habermas differentiates between steering crises that arise inside the system domains of the economy and the state and pathologies that appear within the lifeworld. This occurs when persistent system disturbances of the functional systems of the economy or the state are dealt with by attacking the resources of the lifeworld, which are essential for social integration. Habermas emphasizes both the growing tendency towards bureaucratization within a paternalistic welfare state and the expansion of monetarization across the economy. This diagnosis, of a problematic primacy of the economy over the democratically legitimated politics through which societies can act on themselves, is the focus of the analyses of capitalism that run through all of Habermas's work.

Place-Holder for Rationality

Habermas's scientific thought is in general marked by conceptual distinctions. Sociology, for him, confronts problems of social integration or disintegration, while philosophy is destined to practice epistemological reconstruction and hereby to uncover structures of rationality in the use of language for mutual understanding. In this sense, philosophy is the “representative of reason,” though a reason which has become postmetaphysically modest and itself divided between the cognitive-instrumental, the moral-practical, and the aesthetic-expressive (Habermas, 1983: 9–28; tr. 116–194). The corresponding conceptual differentiation in the typology of action is that between instrumental, normative, and dramaturgic action. Within the socio-cultural lifeworld, philosophy is assigned the role of an interpreter, which opens up the exclusive knowledge of experts and makes it accessible to public debate. In this way, philosophy helps to make transparent the interplay of descriptive, normative, and evaluative validity aspects. The rationality of the philosopher, reconstructed in linguistic theory and enlisted in a fallibilistic awareness that renounces the aspiration to ultimate justifications, is neither a mere method—such as inferential thought—nor something substantial in the form of objective spirit. Instead, Habermas understands reason as something performative: as problem-solving behavior via the practice of intersubjective understanding. He worked out a particular procedure for such practical problem solutions: what is expressed in discourses is something that has become controversial in the form of manifest or latent disagreements between human actors. He prescribes an unconstrained practice of argumentation for these discourses. Only what stands up to rational reasons [vernünftigen Gründen] is true in a cognitive sense and right in a moral sense. Habermas also differentiates between discourses. Theoretical Discourse functions to test truth claims in order to clarify scientific questions. The claims of normative rightness in moral questions are to be clarified in practical discourses. The task for aesthetic criticism is to make the expressive domain accessible to judgement (Habermas, 1991: 100–226). The conditions of an ideal speech situation regulating discourse, as formulated in discourse ethics, operate as a reference point which helps to identify and to criticize forms of systematically distorted communication.

For Habermas, it is a good academic practice to take up and work on the arguments of his very numerous critics, so as to counter what he admits to be the cognitive provinciality of the finite mind. His political and social criticism is guided by the hope that practical changes may eventually occur. This is the expectation that power structures whose injustice has been demonstrated can also be overcome. He does not claim to perceive what secretly holds society together. Rather, critique as he understands it is particularly vulnerable to the risk of error. He does not offer final answers, since the practice of thinking and critique as he understands it is an open, fallible process of argumentation, which must always be repeated. This is the way in which people can themselves discover what forms of life they find just and to be shaped by solidaristic responsibility for one another and, thus, can be called worth living.

Habermas is far from recommending the academic form of the seminar as a general model for the resolution of conflicting interests. Discourses are rather, as he liked to say, “islands in the sea of practice.” But the communicative use of reason—under conditions of freedom—offers in principle the possibility of mutual understanding and agreement. The protagonist of discourse ethics himself aimed to follow his own principles of speech grounded in reasons as a pugnacious participant in controversies which he had himself initiated, in debates in political conflicts and in the practice of scholarship. In this context, he warned all his life against confusing technological problems with questions of practical politics and social justice, which should be resolved in discourse.

Diagnoses of the Times

In his theory of modernity, Habermas adopts a strictly sociological approach to the change in the form of social integration. This covers various functionally specialized subsystems—such as the state, economy, law, culture, scholarship, and religion. As for the exercise of political authority, this is in principle bound by laws. Despite the regulative and socially integrative power of the rational system of law, which he investigated in Faktizität und Geltung (originally published in 1992), the future of modernity is endangered: first, through the scientific-technical exploitation of the natural environment; second, through the expansion of bureaucratic administrative structures; and, finally, through the dynamics of the capitalistically organized economy. Today the crisis tendencies described by Habermas have taken on globally threatening dimensions with growing climate change, the risks of big technology, military dangers, and the risky strategies of the global finance markets.

Now there is also the power position of global media conglomerates under the control of a few owners who follow their own anti-democratic agenda. The political and social effects of this development led Habermas to update his Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, published over 60 years ago and since then a social-scientific classic (Habermas, 2022). Here, he starts from the premise that the public sphere must be democratically organized and institutionally secured. Only then can one expect that the public exercise of reason, which is essential for democracy, to have enlightening—and, hence, rationalizing—effects.

Habermas sees the current digitalization as “the third media revolution” added to the previous two, which followed the discovery of writing and then the printing press. On the one hand, these media-technical innovations lead to a worldwide interconnection and opening of national communication spaces to one another. On the other hand, communication via platform media and networks—such as Facebook and YouTube—produces a deformalization and fragmentation of public communication. As a consequence, the divide between “publicity” and “privacy” disappears. Pointing to the fundamentally “agonistic character” of public debates, Habermas emphasizes that it is not the multiplicity of voices in the networks of social media that is problematic but, rather, the withdrawal into the closed space of a communicative bubble. This self-referential communication is at the cost of the deliberative quality of democratic processes of opinion- and will-formation. Targeted disinformation penetrates the digital network, out of reach of journalistic ethics and without the filter of editorial reworking and testing of its truth, with the suggestion that these unedited articulations are spontaneous and direct and thereby wholly authentic. Thus, the scarce resource of attention is misused. The public sphere is currently threatened with fragmentation into a cacophony of arbitrary untested expressions of opinion and “likes” and “dislikes.”

Only if individual opinions stand up to testing for and against and can be further addressed in the public sphere do they acquire the dignity of arguments with a rationally motivating force. For Habermas, these processes have a filtering function. They should ensure that private opinions are transformed into public expressions of opinion, which provide an orienting framework for the democratic decision processes of a participatory democracy. Habermas notes that the condition of a democracy can be heard [abgehorcht] in the “heartbeat of its political public sphere.”

Theory of Society

Habermas's project of a theory of society [Gesellschaftstheorie] has a holistic and integrative character, in that it addresses both the philosophical question of the conditions of possibility of (communicative) reason and the sociological question of social integration. In their interdisciplinary relation to one another, both disciplines complement and correct one another. Since Habermas's linguistic turn and his Christian Gauss Lectures at Princeton in 1971, the leading premise of a rationality embodied in language has been convincingly demonstrated through the philosophically conducted rational reconstruction of the rules followed in communicative interactions and the fallibilist validity claims that are raised. In his analysis of the conditions of social order, Habermas relies on sociology as an empirical science of experience that includes the understanding of meaning. It confronts the substantive task of a diagnosis of the present time. This program of a theory of society, which Habermas followed and whose categories he worked out over the decades, is the larger frame of reference in which he brought to fruition the “internal relation” between sociology and the philosophically grounded reconstruction of communicative reason (Habermas, 2024: 89f; 106).

Habermas's theory of society was based on the assumption that societies are normatively integrated, insofar as they establish for their formation basic ethical, moral, and legal principles, which are institutionalized, generally accepted by their members, and enable them to judge whether the social arrangements are, in fact, just or unjust, legitimate or illegitimate. This possibility of going beyond a mere description of the institutionalized norms to judge them in relation to the grounds of their justification and the practices of their application is the general condition for social criticism. It is concerned with the question of whether the social order deserves to be recognized.

The focus of Habermas's philosophical and sociological thought is the principle of discussion free from domination, which relies on the unforced force of the better argument. He combines this principle with the call for individual emancipation, which he understands—like Kant—as “self-emancipation from self-incurred dependencies.”

In a whole series of obituaries, Habermas is located in the tradition of critical theory. This relates to the fact that, from 1954 to 1956, he was Theodor W. Adorno's assistant and then, from 1964, Max Horkheimer's successor as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt. But more decisive than these personal and institutional connections and attributions are Habermas's own independent and innovative achievements, which led him in the course of an ongoing process of research to his own theory of society. This theory of communication he does not understand as a continuation of critical theory but, rather, as its transformation in the sense of a new conceptual foundation and diagnostic direction. He therefore repeatedly resisted in interviews and essays being directly assigned to critical theory. “For me,” he explained, “there was no critical theory, no somehow integrated doctrine.” He concludes: “The suggestive fiction of a unified school should not take up too much energy for its self-thematising in terms of the history of ideas. We would do better to address the problems themselves” (Habermas, 1986; my translation).

Habermas's late work, developed in the course of the past ten years, has “philosophy” in the title and conceals the fact that the constellation of belief and knowledge is in fact in the foreground. In Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019), however, Habermas makes clear that he is concerned to demonstrate that the capacity to distinguish between processes of rational justification and merely taking something to be true is the result of socio-cultural learning processes (and is to be distinguished from systemic adaptive processes). These, in turn, take place in social space and historical time and can therefore only be interpreted and understood against the background of critical transformations and structural changes in society. Thus, in this philosophically titled genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking, social theory remains the basis for explaining the progress of reason in history along with the worldwide exacerbation of regressive tendencies in our times.

What remains in the face of the inexorable facticity of the death of this philosopher and sociologist is the memory of the brilliant intellectual quality of a sympathetic and always present person and his work as a source of continuing processes of reflection.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Stefan Müller-Doohm is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Oldenburg. Among his publications: Adornos Minima Moralia. Poetik und Philosophie (coedited, 2024); Jürgen Habermas, »Es musste etwas besser werden …«. Gespräche mit Stefan Müller-Doohm und Roman Yos (2024); Vernünftige Freiheit und öffentliche Vernunft. Beiträge zum Spätwerk von Jürgen Habermas (Coeditor, 2024); Habermas Global. Wirkungsgeschichte eines Werks (Coeditor, 2019); Jürgen Habermas. Eine Biographie (2014; translated by Daniel Steuer, 2016); Adorno. Eine Biographie (2003; translated by Rodney Livingstone. 2005).

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