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Despite its canonical name, the Frankfurt School is not a school. It is, at least according to my former teacher, the critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi, a constellation. For a century, this scholarly constellation has pursued the intellectual endeavour of critique. Critique here is not the “thumbs down” or “blocking” exercised on social media. It is the wild aspiration to describe reality in a way that transforms it.
Jürgen Habermas, who died on 14 March 2026 at the age of 96, was a fixed star in this constellation. He set the compass for several generations of mostly German and North American thinkers. Habermas was incredibly prolific, with more than 40 books to his name, and very charismatic. There was an intensity, a concentration to Habermas’s thought and dialogue that his writings convey only poorly. The thundering polemics he brought to public debates also seem a far cry from the consensus-oriented discourse ethics he is known for.
But consensus-oriented discourse ethics by itself is perhaps not the best way to pin down Habermas’s position. Sure, he can be taken as a bourgeois thinker whose liberal complacency betrayed the radicalism of the previous exiled Frankfurt generation. He also sidelined feminist research and boycotted Michel Foucault’s concept of the imbrication of knowledge with power, by insisting that there was such a thing as domination-free discourse. This picture makes you wonder whether he even belongs to the camp of critique. But it is partly a caricature.
At the beginning of his career, Habermas was deemed too radically leftwing by Max Horkheimer, the then director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Only Theodor Adorno’s insistence kept the door open to the pamphleteering young assistant who was to become the first notable non-Jewish proponent of the Frankfurt School.
As his early writings make clear, Habermas was faithful to the Marxist endeavour of finding progressive forces in history as it was actually unfolding. But he did not think that technological development or growth in production held any residues of reason, something that his teachers, too, had already started to suspect. Habermas thus settled for a human capacity other than productive labour, namely communication. This shift was more than a little inspired by Hannah Arendt’s elaboration of human action as culminating in public speech, though this was a debt that Habermas only briefly mentions in an opening footnote without reference to any of Arendt’s actual texts.
To contemporary realists, this may seem a very alien idea: that there should be such a thing as “communicative reason”, slowly accumulating alongside a human history steeped in colonial violence and the oppression of women (on the grounds that they lack reason). But then again, the democratic clubs and the free press Habermas highlighted did also articulate the attempts at emancipation from these structures. Important extensions of Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, to feminist counter-publics (by Nancy Fraser) and proletarian traditions (by Alexander Kluge), further its plausibility.
In any case, it is not his idealism, but his materialism that made Habermas stick to the idea of a progressive evolution of communication. Whatever it takes to redeem history has to be right there, within it. Perhaps our age of nihilism, disinformation and AI slop lends new credibility to that idea. If communication breaks down, there is little left other than the proto-fascist “might is right”.
And Habermas was all but blind to the possibility of such breakdowns. One of his major, two-volume works, the 1981 Theory of Communicative Action, maps in thorough detail how systems mediated by non-verbal powers – such as the market and bureaucratic rationalisation – can override the negotiation possible in what he calls the “lifeworld”. Only the lifeworld – family, civil society, education – is at least in principle organised in a communicative way, and can thus answer to moral demands.
This work also contains a reconstruction of the project of critical theory that gives it a surprising continuity across generations. Starting from the Hungarian communist György Lukács, Habermas tells the subsequent Frankfurt School history as one of successive critiques of the phenomenon of reification. Lukács’s description of the worker sharing the fate of the commodities he produces, as well as Adorno and Horkheimer’s considerations of petrified inner and outer nature, can be traced onward beyond Habermas himself. His successor Axel Honneth’s work on recognition, Judith Butler’s analysis of normalising violence, or Jaeggi’s rethinking of alienation are all critiques of reification. The protestation that living beings are not things echoes back and forth within the entire constellation of critics.
One might want to believe that something as fundamental as that should be obvious. Yet nothing is ever obvious to philosophers. Habermas, especially in his later work, got more and more intricate and formalist in trying to secure the argumentative grounds for rejecting the reduction of people to mute objects. But again, his standards – the ideals of so called “formal pragmatics” – are not deduced from pure reason, but from actual exchange. At least according to Habermas, we misunderstand what communication is if we do not accept that besides all strategic aims, it also seeks to establish a certain shared understanding. And that understanding, again more in principle than actuality, can be described as a non-coercive consensus. The test for morality is whether it could achieve such approval by anyone concerned. Most actual utterances fail the test, but if language lost all aspiration to reach understanding, communication would break down, even if words kept being uttered. Maybe it has. And yet, dear reader, aren’t we still communicating?
A colleague of mine, the Polish philosopher Iwona Janicka, once turned to me in the middle of a conversation about inclusion and exclusion within academia. I had mentioned some infighting within critical theory. “The Frankfurt School?” She frowned. “Don’t they realise they’re dead?” It makes me laugh still. With much less comic relief, I have heard the same sentiment uttered by leading scholars in the field utterly dismayed at the chiding statement in which Habermas and his colleagues categorically ruled out calling Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide. They wondered whether critical theory would ever recover from such a failure of judgment.
My wager is that the resources are there, buried within it, and not least in the very work of Jürgen Habermas.
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Eva von Redecker is a German philosopher and nonfiction writer
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