Abstract
Jürgen Habermas’ death on 14 March 2026 might be seen as the end to a long and prominent tradition of critical theory. While others have followed Habermas’ example, no one has matched this towering figure whose sociological writings and contributions to public intellectual life spanned an impressive seven decades. Without trying to be overly polemical, I want to suggest that 2026 was marked by another event that arguably put a more symbolic end to critical theory of a Frankfurt School bent. That event was the publication, in January 2026, of Hartmut Rosa’s latest book, Situation und Konstellation: Vom Verschwinden des Spielraums [Situation and Constellation: On the Disappearing Space for Action].
Rosa, a professor of sociology at the University of Jena, Germany, is often said to represent the fourth generation of critical theory—following in the gigantic footsteps of Adorno and Horkheimer of the old Institute for Social Research, then Habermas, and then, as the third generation, Axel Honneth, Rosa’s PhD advisor. This is obviously an impressive and heavy lineage to take over, and it would be unfair to expect from each new generation that it matches the level of those preceding it. And yet, each new generation going out of Frankfurt School critical theory has produced important, influential work. In Rosa’s case, this is evident not least in his books on social acceleration and resonance (Rosa, 2013, 2019), both of which have added new dimensions to the critical theory tradition and have found wide, yes, resonance in contemporary social theory and beyond.
To be sure, not all of Rosa’s work has been equally well received. For example, David Inglis has recently offered a long to-the-point critique of the latest English Rosa volume, Time and World (Rosa, 2025). According to Inglis, this collection of essays advances “a certain sort of transcendent Christian vision” (Inglis, 2026: 3) that sits oddly with a critical theory legacy. In fact, writes Inglis, “A suspicion forms that the material in this book, and found elsewhere in the Rosa conceptual universe, involves a further spurt of embourgeoisification of critical theory, rendering it palatable for well-disposed middle-class people of a self-discovering bent” (2026: 5, original emphasis). In other words, part of the popularity of Rosa’s work might be explained by the fact that it is perfectly tuned toward this type of middle-class audience. This is not per se bad. It could in principle reflect the ability of Rosa’s conceptual apparatus to capture important aspects of contemporary society. “But,” Inglis asks, “at what costs is critical thought made to rely on foundations that are apparently so gemütlich, and eminently includable in a Sunday morning sermon?” (2026: 5, original emphasis). “Have some red lines […] been already crossed, and if so, with which consequences?” (2026: 6).
Reading Situation and Constellation suggests that the concerns raised by Inglis are only further intensified—not least if one sees in Rosa’s work a commitment to the critical theory tradition. Indeed, as I shall argue, although in this latest book Rosa does not explicitly promote populist policies (in fact, he does critique some), the analysis he presents easily lends itself to both left-wing and, especially, right-wing, reactionary adoption—so much so that one wonders what happened to the project of critical theory. Has it come to an end with Rosa’s Situation and Constellation? The answer seems to me to be a resounding yes. As I am not a card-carrying member of the critical theory tradition, I do not have stakes in its demise. However, from an intellectual history perspective, I am puzzled that critical theory could evolve into this place.
Situation and Constellation is, at long stretches, a rehearsal of Weber’s ideas of society’s increasing rationalization—showing that, yes, we did end up inhabiting a steel-hard casing—or of Habermas’ notion of the system’s colonization of the lifeworld. Rosa refers to both Weber (the analysis of bureaucracy) and Habermas (the colonization thesis). But whereas Habermas’ (1987) analysis of colonization in A Theory of Communicative Action is brief and tentative, Situation and Constellation is one long catalogue of its key dynamics. As with Weberian rationalization and Habermasian colonialization, Rosa’s project is confined to reflections on Northern-European modernity. Granted, in the final chapter he refers to examples from India and Brazil, which are mobilized as a potential way out of the malaise he diagnoses, but his core concern remains with what he presents as a particular form of late modernity in parts of the Global North.
The book opens with a set of examples that Rosa returns to throughout. One concerns an 11-year-old girl who, having saved money for this event for a while, goes to a fast-food restaurant to buy a burger. Once handed out, however, she soon drops it. Even if they wanted to, the person in the counter cannot offer her a replacement. The system does not allow. Another example: two German football teams meet in the final game of the season. One of the teams, SC Freiburg (apparently, Rosa’s favorite team), brings one of their legendary players, the striker, Nils Petersen, onto the pitch with 20 minutes left of the game—in what is his last performance for the club he has saved on numerous occasions. Petersen soon scores and ecstasy breaks out in the stadium. The goal changes nothing in the overall table, neither for SC Freiburg nor for the opposing team, VFL Wolfsburg, but the goal matters as a symbol of Petersen’s long career and commitment to SC Freiburg and provides the best-possible occasion for his fans to celebrate him. However, VAR interferes and the goal is annulled due to a violation in the lead-up to Petersen scoring.
According to Rosa, these and similar examples illustrate the main thesis in his book: Whether it is the employee working in the counter of a fast-food chain or the referee overseeing a football match, it is increasingly the case that rules—often enforced through algorithmic systems—inhibit their space for action (Handlungsspielraum). Instead of humans making a decision based on a judgment of the situation and its complex layers, they are reduced to mere “executors” (Vollziehende) of systemic rules. This is why, for Rosa, the fast-food employee cannot offer the girl a replacement of her lost burger and why the referee cannot allow Petersen and his fans this final goal for the club—even though this would, Rosa clearly believes, be the right thing to do.
For Rosa, what is at stake here is a conflict between situations and constellations, a distinction drawn from the work of the German phenomenologist, Hermann Schmitz. Rosa (2026: 12) defines a constellation as “an arrangement of uniquely identifiable individual things that stand in a fixed, measurable, and often binary-coded relationship to one another”. In contrast, situations are “in their meanings and therefore also in their scope—that is, in the determination of everything that belongs to them—constitutively blurry, in particular at the edges” (2026: 48, original emphasis). Rosa argues that, when considered as proper situations, the referee would likely need to take into account Petersen’s long-but-about-to-end career and the fact that nothing is at stake in the table, just as the employee at the fast-food chain might presume that the girl is poor and therefore compensate her with a new burger. Constellations take away such blurriness and reduce, or rather transform, situations to clear-cut if-so decision-making sequences: If the girl cannot pay for a new burger, she obviously will not get any. If Petersen’s team made a foul in the lead up to his goal, then, of course, the goal doesn’t count. To repeat the point, the blurriness of situations that calls for human judgment is replaced by easy-to-follow instructions, and this significantly diminishes the space for human action to do what is proper in the situation.
Rosa’s general diagnosis of the present suggests that late modern society is increasingly being subjected to such constellationalist logics—whether they manifest in VAR, in algorithmic decision-making, or in similar executions of binary programs that abstract from the complexities of the specific situations in which they are deployed. He further suggests that this development changes how humans relate to both things and other humans. For example, Rosa argues that children playing with Lego bricks used to do so in a creative fashion, building designs on the basis of their own imagination. In contrast, he continues, Lego today is mainly about building predesigned structures (a ship, a plane, and so on), by carefully following step-by-step instructions. This, he claims, has taken playfulness, fingertip-feeling, and judgment out of humans’ relation to these bricks. Similarly, he asserts that when constellationist logics dominate inter-human relations, people no longer see each other as acting individuals but rather as entities that execute decisions. This, he claims, makes people feel powerless—which may lead to burnout.
Importantly, while Rosa deplores the move toward a constellationist logic, he does grant it certain benefits. Again, following Weber, he admits that rules are often introduced for a reason: they are enforced in order to address particular issues. For example, constellationist tendencies spread in response to arbitrary, unfair, unequal treatment—so as to avoid, say, that the bureaucrat, teacher, doctor, and so on unduly discriminate their clients, students, or patients. This is rationalization at its core; the proliferation of rules which are each introduced for reasons most people would find both important and legitimate. That said, Rosa clearly thinks constellationist logics have come to dominate too much.
At one level, the shift Rosa describes does have some truth to it. Rules and algorithmic decision-making have become more predominant in late modern society, as has been widely demonstrated (e.g., Borch, 2026; Fourcade and Healy, 2024). But Rosa not only seeks to diagnose this shift. His book is one long plea for reviving the types of situations and human judgment in them that, he claims, are being pushed into the background. However, as I shall argue, key aspects of the analysis are fundamentally underdeveloped, ambivalent, or, more devastating (from a critical theory point of view), they lend themselves to a reactionary reading.
One underdeveloped dimension concerns how to act in a situation. Rosa seems to presume there is always a right way to act in a situation, based on one’s judgment and fingertip-feeling. Yet he offers only a few reflections on why that is so and how to achieve this. Kant’s notion of judgement is mentioned once, in passing. Instead, Rosa is more inspired by Aristotle and his notion of “equity”: the equitable person is one who appreciates that the law is general and, as such, may not apply equally well in particular situations and who therefore applies the general rule in light of the particular situation. Despite this intellectual lineage, it remains unclear whether and how different humans would reach a similar judgment when confronted with identical situations. Aristotelian phronesis might have served as inspiration here, but Rosa’s interest in Aristotle is restricted to the idea of equity.
Even more problematic, Rosa tends to present his examples as if the “right” action is straightforward and in alignment with what he himself would do. But should the referee actually dispense with the rules and let Petersen have his goal? Why is this situation only to be interpreted to the benefit of Rosa’s favorite team? Is it reasonable to assume that the competing team’s players, staff, and fans would agree that Petersen deserves his goal in spite of rules being violated in the lead up? And if a situational interpretation of the goal-scoring moment were to be pursued, how should the referee deal with any potential information about the match being played on the birthday of the opposing team’s goalkeeper or of some of its fans—shouldn’t that information then also be factored into the referee’s understanding of the situation? And, while immediately harsh sounding, why could it not be a proper situational judgement to say to the girl losing her burger that, since we live in a world of overconsumption and massive waste, it is important that she takes better care of whatever she buys? And would it not, therefore, be a valuable lesson for her future consumption patterns that she is not compensated for her loss?
Had Rosa mobilized feminist standpoint theory or any theory associated with a more perspectival realist tradition (Go, 2016), his analysis would likely have been more open to the notion that different actors may have completely different experiences of particular situations and therefore also different interpretations of what is proper action. For example, he argues that when people reach for their camera at a festive event, they “leave the situation” and experience it from the outside (2026: 10). But is that how, say, teenagers feel today when recording concerts or other events with their phones? Might we not be witnessing here a new type of being-in-the-world that is, from the outset, more “synthetic” (Knorr Cetina, 2009) than in the past—that is, more technologically mediated—without this necessarily entailing less of a sense of presence and attentiveness on the part of those who experience events with their phones in the hand? Is Rosa’s own generational relationship to technology shaping his interpretation of the situation?
Another underdeveloped dimension of Rosa’s analysis concerns its evidence which consists of an eclectic blend of more anecdotal evidence and fictive, hypothetical examples, many of which are rather quirky. One focuses on the use of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Here, too, Rosa laments a shift from situations to constellations. In the past: One had to find suitable pipes, get black powder and a fuse, build a nozzle, calculate the dosages correctly, etc. All of this required—precisely: experience, judgment, sense of responsibility; and yes, it could go wrong, for which the moral accountability then hit the rocket builder. By comparison, one can say that launching a purchased New Year’s rocket is more like a mélange of action and execution: Pulling off safety strips and lighting the fuse: That is constellative execution of specifications. But still, whoever wants to let individual rockets rise must decide on the purchase, choose the respective fireworks type, find a suitable location, get containers to put the rockets in, consider the sequence of ignition, etc. In recent years, however, one has moved, for the sake of convenience and safety, to selling entire rocket batteries. Here only very few, precisely predetermined hand movements are required to set off an entire firework. Action has been reduced to minimal execution and maximal enjoyment. And everywhere the call rings out to centralize fireworks bureaucratically. (2026: 40, original emphasis)
Rosa similarly describes a tendency where medical doctors drawing on AI address patients with a list of binary questions (e.g., “can the patient stand—Yes/no?”), in effect reducing them to a constellationist logic. He speculates that this is why various forms of alternative medicine are popular, as they claim to offer a more complete treatment of the patient as a whole person (2026: 36–38). Interesting as such examples might be, their implications are difficult to ascertain. Is Rosa effectively arguing in favour of alternative medicine and of home-made fireworks to be launched on New Year’s Eve where alcohol consumption is high in many places? His valorization of situational judgment and his critique of constellationist logics seem to suggest so. Is this critical theory anno 2026?
As mentioned, Situation and Constellation is full of ambivalence. For example, throughout most of the book, Rosa treats the distinction between situation and constellation in a rigid fashion: the latter’s logic is said to undermine situational awareness and action in ever-more spheres of life. Regardless of where Rosa’s gaze focuses attention, he sees that “regulations and requirements everywhere hem in the spaces for action” (2026: 31, original emphasis). Moreover, he treats situation and constellation as unambiguous opposites—either there is situation or there is constellation. They constitute distinct spheres, to put it in Weberian terms. At the same time, however, Rosa ends the book by admitting that often people actually manage quite well to navigate between situations and constellations: Precisely because situations cannot be reduced to (technical and bureaucratic) constellations, people are forced everywhere and again and again to become actors against the constellative specifications, to use or even create spaces for action even there, where there is (no longer) supposed to be any. We experience this in everyday life everywhere, where things happen that actually aren’t supposed to be possible: actually I’m not allowed to give you a second burger; actually I’m not allowed to issue the authorization without tax identification number […]. And so on and so forth. If we didn’t constantly do anew and in all areas of life what actually isn’t supposed to be possible, not only would all humanness freeze in social interactions, but social life itself would come to a standstill. In fact, these exceptions rule our life and our action-executions (Handlungsvollzüge) at least as much as the “correct” constellative specifications, but the “Weberian” understanding of modernity has made them so invisible, so to speak unsayable, that we systematically deceive ourselves not only about the functioning of modern societies, but even about our own way of life. (2026: 199–200, original emphasis)
But doesn’t this undercut Rosa’s entire argument? If people find ways to circumvent the constellational logics—if people manage to bend the supposedly inflexible rules after all—are we really facing a problem? What is the normative urgency of the critique Rosa advances if the problem is nominal rather than real? Related, isn’t the issue here primarily one of analytical blindness? Might it be, as the quote suggests, that it is the Weberian rationalization framing, to which Rosa subscribes, that blinds him to these ways of pragmatically navigating rules: applying them when it makes sense and tweaking them when it feels right?
Another and more alarming form of ambivalence concerns reactionary, populist politics. On the one hand, Rosa offers a few reflections on Trump, arguing that his popularity, and that of right-wing populism more generally, may “unconsciously reflect a longing for capacity to act (Handlungsfähigkeit)” (2026: 19, original emphasis). In other words, people may support such political movements because they are tired of being inhibited by constellationist logics and wish for a strong, sovereign leader to cut through the malaise. “So provocative, yes shocking the talk about sovereign action in this context may sound: it clearly shows the ambivalence, or at least the risk, of the attempt to return from execution to action” (2026: 102–103). I completely agree, and this is why, on the other hand, it is striking that Rosa does not seem to appreciate that his romanticization of situations lends itself to a Carl Schmittean reading. Indeed, it would be in complete alignment with Rosa’s position if some politician said, “The rules that have been imposed on us by others inhibit our life. We need to dispense with the constellationist logics, create a state of exception, and bring human judgment back in. I happen to know how to do that—i.e., how to act in ways that are right to the people!”
Not only is such a (decisionist) reading of Rosa’s argument completely plausible; there is nothing in his conceptual apparatus preventing such an interpretation. Although Rosa should perhaps be credited for going as far as he could analytically with the situation/constellation distinction, he offers no reflections on what might guide the choice between the two sides in the sense of detailing when one is to be preferred over the other. There is therefore nothing in his book preventing the leap from the romanticization of the Handlungsspielraum to a more disconcerting translation of this space for action into a call for a Lebensraum that dispenses with constellationist rules. While I appreciate that this may sound overly polemical, I do think there is a genuine slippery-slope problem in Rosa’s book, especially considering that we are dealing with an intervention in critical theory. And this is only reinforced by how he ties expressive action to life: A plea for action is a plea for life. Action is life, for life does not unfold itself in the execution of fully optimized and optimizing programs nor in the enjoyment of thereby produced, flawless goods, but expressly: in the daily confrontation with a reality that demands our eye-measure, fingertip-feeling, and judgment, in which we constantly make new experiences through which we develop and change ourselves. For this we need spaces for action and judgment that allows us to find ourselves in our answers to the constantly changing situative demands of the world, to try out and transform them, to develop our self-efficacy step-by-step, to sharpen our judgment, and to experience ourselves as morally responsible beings. (2026: 177, original emphasis)
Again, a reactionary reading of this is entirely plausible; in fact, it seems to follow logically from Rosa’s broader argument and its valorization of situations and critique of constellations.
As stated, my key concern is how easily Rosa’s new book lends itself to a reactionary-decisionist reading. Recall that Inglis asks whether Rosa has crossed a red line. If one believes in critical theory and hopes for critical theory to offer an internal bulwark against reactionary appropriation, then yes, Situation and Constellation crosses a red line. Inglis (2026: 5) notes that “A theory that does not appeal to the deep dispositions of its addressees will likely fail to be taken up by them,” suggesting that Rosa indeed has managed to appeal to the dispositions of his readers. On behalf of critical theory, one can only hope that this new book’s appeal to reactionary dispositions will remain latent.
