When the ‘unforced force’ of Habermas’s argument met Brexit and Gaza

Born in Düsseldorf in 1929, at his father’s instigation, he joined the junior Hitler Youth. What he witnessed became the engine of everything he wrote, and he became one of the most trenchant critics of fascism and Nazism, so much so that he went on to challenge Martin Heidegger, who was at the time, one of the most significant philosophers of his mileau.

Jürgen Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was first published in 1962. (Source: amazon.in/AI)

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (German ު English translation by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, MIT Press, 1989)

Those just discovering the philosopher should begin with his concept of the public sphere. In this book, Habermas traces the emergence of an informal arena where private citizens could discuss and deliberate on matters of common concern. He believed that this would allow the public to shape political life through reason alone.

His idea was based on 18th-century coffee houses, salons and newspapers.  He called this common room of sorts where people came together to voice their concerns on matters of political concern, the bourgeois public sphere. It was his firm belief that democratic legitimacy was forged in these spheres, through what he called “the unforced force of the better argument.”

The coffee house is now a comment section below an online post, and the newspaper of record competes with a thousand Substack essays. In 2022, Habermas published a brief sequel addressing fake news and filter bubbles. However, what happens to democracy when the arena for rational deliberation collapses, the sequel cannot satisfactorily answer.

Jürgen Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action comprises two dense volumes.

The Theory of Communicative Action (German ޽ English translation by Thomas McCarthy, Beacon Press: Vol. 1, ߀ Vol. 2, 1987)

Habermas explains his next well-debated concept, the theory of communicative action, in two dense volumes, but they are the foundation on which everything else rests.

Habermas’ argues that rationality is not a quality possessed by exceptional individuals and is the natural outcome of people talking to each other in good faith, and that manipulation and deception are corruptions of something language itself reaches toward.

Not everybody agreed with him. In 2019, Cambridge philosopher Raymond Geuss argued in The Point magazine that Brexit had rendered Habermas’ argument null and void. It was debate, Geuss contended, that manufactured the crisis, transforming a fringe position into a national rupture. “Discussions,” he wrote, “just as often foster polemics, and generate further bitterness, rancor and division.”

Seyla Benhabib, then at Yale, was of the mind that Geuss had attacked a caricature and committed a performative contradiction. Meanwhile, Berkeley historian Martin Jay said that by abandoning communicative rationality, Geuss had “preempted the possibility of objecting to anything at all that might happen in his post-discussion future world.”

Writing in The Outline, philosopher Tom Whyman found both defences in adequate. He said that the Habermasian habit of treating discourse as an end in itself had curdled into “pseudo-activity.” It was merely using awareness-raising as a substitute for action.

Jürgen Habermas’ book Between Facts and Norms was first published in 1962. (Source: amazon.in/AI)

Between Facts and Norms (German ߈ English translation by William Rehg, MIT Press, 1996)

The book bridges the gap between what legitimate law is and what it ought to be, essentially rules citizens could in principle have given themselves through free deliberation.

However, read it alongside the controversy that engulfed Habermas in his final years and the tension  is unmissible.

In 2023, Habermas co-authored “Principles of Solidarity,” arguing that support for Israel is “a fundamental part of German political culture” and cautioning against those in Germany protesting its military campaign. Sociologist Asef Bayat responded in New Lines Magazine with what the editors called an immanent critique, a challenge from within Habermasian logic itself.

In German universities, Bayat observed, almost everyone fell silent when Palestine came up. People had been dismissed and events cancelled for calling for a ceasefire. His charge was that German exceptionalism itself creates the differential moral standards Between Facts and Norms was written to prevent, designating some lives as worthy of protection and others as less so. He described a “hidden sphere” in democratic Germany where young people held one set of views in private and performed another in public. He said this bore a rather uncanny and unsettling resemblance to pre-1989 Eastern Europe.

Habermas has also been criticised for a Western-centric (Eurocentric) and idealised approach to democracy, which has come to be known as Habermas exceptionalism.