Read Part 1 here.
For all his work on the liberatory power of “civil society”, Habermas underestimated one crucial factor: the state has long since responded to the challenges posed by civil society institutions. It finances and steers them. The state thus has at its disposal a powerful network of politically and quasi-politically active organizations that lacks democratic legitimacy, with which it is inextricably intertwined, and which enables it to act with remarkable efficiency against opponents, including those elected to govern.
That this is no mere chimera is demonstrated in Germany by the events following the Bundestag vote of January 29, 2025, which called for a stricter migration policy. In the wake of the election, a broad alliance of state-funded and charitable organizations called for protests against its outcome—protests during which Christian Democratic Party offices were attacked, with ensuing property damage, trespassing, and intimidation.
In June 1967, Habermas had intervened decisively against student activist Rudi Dutschke’s revolutionary rhetoric, speaking sharply of “left-wing fascism” (“Linksfaschismus”). This time, when the charge seemed even more apt, he remained silent.
In 1967, Habermas addressed student activism as “left-wing fascism” (“Linksfaschismus”). That charge wasn’t repeated when activists attacked Christian Democratic party offices in 2025.
The sums involved here, incidentally, are dramatic: the state-funded program “Demokratie leben!” (“Living Democracy!”), from which numerous civil society institutions receive at least partial funding, has a budget of €190 million for 2026. There is also a glaring lack of transparency. When an alliance recently called for the prevention of a party congress of the right-populist AfD—even though party congresses are mandated by federal electoral law—it was supported by organizations one would hardly instinctively classify as party-political actors: among them the “Naturfreunde Thüringen” society (“Nature Friends Thuringia”), which contributed €2.12 million to the alliance, the Thuringian State Youth Council, and the Protestant Church’s “Office for Foreign Fellow Citizens”.
The web of state, quasi-state, and non-state but indirectly subsidized institutions long ago became virtually impossible to survey. In this ecosystem, not only the imperatives of the administered world, but those of the economy remain very much alive: “So Done” [English in the original], a for-profit LLC co-founded in 2022 by Liberal Party (FDP) politician Franziska Brandmann, uses AI on behalf of clients to scan social media for alleged “insults”, arranges cost-free legal action through partner lawyers, and finances itself through a contractual share of the civil damages and warning fees paid by those found liable. A business model without risk. This private-sector operation is complemented by the broad phenomenon of state-funded reporting platforms, where citizens can anonymously report the digital behavior of others. Citizens monitoring citizens—Habermas, who according to Die Zeit’s obituary remained “up to the very end abreast of the latest developments”, had nothing to say about this.
Habermas’s “civil society” long ago detached itself from the role he assigned it: conveying social pressure directly into parliament. Instead, it operates as a democratically non-legitimated auxiliary agency of the government and undermines the rule of law. It may indeed be doubted that Habermas’s model ever described reality in the first place: even the old anti-nuclear movement was by no means fueled solely by spontaneous impulses from the “lifeworld”, but was from the outset permeated by ideological and party-political actors.
Habermas’s “civil society” today operates as an auxiliary agency of the government and undermines the rule of law.
Although the demand for neutrality in public reason is clearly present in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas touches only peripherally on the question of structural abuse. He explains that one must “distinguish actors who, so to speak, emerge from the public and participate in the reproduction of the public sphere itself, from actors who occupy an already constituted public sphere in order to make use of it”. What forces, specifically, might be at work in the latter case remains vague; Habermas merely gestures hazily toward “large, well-organized interest groups anchored in social functional systems”. He plays down the danger of abuse: “Public opinions that can only be launched thanks to an undeclared deployment of money or organizational power lose their credibility as soon as these sources of social power are made public”.
Political reality denial: quite apart from the fact that such instrumentalization has long since become the rule rather than the exception, an opinion launched in the Federal Republic is by no means considered illegitimate when it operates with state backing and subsidies.
A natural response would be to blame Habermas’s advanced age for the obvious deficiencies in his political perception. But that will not do. He underlined the importance he attached to updating his theory by publishing A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 2022. The purpose of this work was to analyze the changes to the public sphere brought about by digital platforms and to examine their consequences for deliberative democracy—focusing in particular on fragmentation and the loss of editorial filters. Habermas saw the freedom afforded by new social media platforms as a danger to his model of democracy and advocated for their state regulation—in other words, their censorship.
Habermas saw new social media platforms as a danger to his model of democracy and advocated for their state regulation—in other words, their censorship.
Criticizing Habermas is easy enough, yet it happens far too rarely from the liberal side. Yet liberalism in particular would be well placed to undertake such criticism, whereas right-wing criticism generally disqualifies itself from the outset through the clumsy charge of “cultural Marxism”.
One may debate the manner in which the prophet of the “ideal speech situation” entered the intellectual fray, for few German philosophers are likely to have been less oriented toward mutual understanding—while simultaneously working so calculatedly, so authoritatively, in other words so strategically, to secure a public response to their ideas—than the great opponent of “strategic communication”. At least in several central debates—above all the Historikerstreit of 1986—Habermas took positions that ought to have been compatible with those of a German liberal.
The intellectual-historical balance sheet of Habermas’s work is essentially in debit to his overwhelming media and political presence. This is owing in no small part to his own primary self-identification as a political thinker. In theoretical philosophy and aesthetics, the eclectic Habermas remained largely colorless, or at least unoriginal.
Genius, they say, is diligence. That may be true; but diligence is certainly not always genius. Habermas’s original achievements are concentrated in practical philosophy, in the philosophy of law and society (The Theory of Communicative Action, discourse ethics, deliberative democracy, theories of the public sphere)—a domain in which his failure is now plain to see.
The intellectual-historical balance sheet of Habermas’s work is essentially in debt to his overwhelming media and political presence.
Nothing illustrates the collapse of Habermas’s thought more starkly than the state of the present-day Federal Republic of Germany. Habermas was politically engagé throughout his life; few other German philosophers have obsessed about politics quite so much. This was a distinguishing feature, since the “skeptical generation” (Helmut Schelsky), to which Habermas belonged, cultivated a certain aristocratic restraint when it came to politics. In 1953, at the age of just twenty-four, Habermas shot to prominence with a political critique of Heidegger in the FAZ—a journalistic accolade that gave his career decisive momentum. His political dispute with Max Horkheimer in 1957-58 indirectly led to his appointment in Heidelberg in 1961. Anyone capable of driving a wedge between the formidable Dioscuri Horkheimer and Adorno had to be taken seriously.
Nothing illustrates the collapse of Habermas’s thought more starkly than the state of the present-day Federal Republic of Germany.
Politics was Habermas’s passion. That there might be citizens who neither wished to participate passionately in political debates nor regarded permanent debate as a form of cultural enrichment always lay beyond his horizon of comprehension. Yet this is precisely one of the defining features of liberalism: the individual’s right to withdraw into the private sphere without fear of sanctions, without having to pay for a personal timeout by surrendering political influence to the hyper-engaged.
Whether he liked it or not, Habermas thus lent his voice to a culture of the “agitated” society—a culture of incessant debate in which an intrusive figure has experienced a curious renaissance, a type whom an old-school German liberal instinctively associates with the GDR: the activist. As early as Student and Politics (1961), Habermas had judged the non-engaged, apolitical student with equal parts condescension and moral indignation. The liberal friend of the rule of law, however, would rather place his trust in democratically legitimate institutions than in the upright convictions of activists. He is quite happy to dispense with the extra-parliamentary influence emanating from the supposed “periphery” that Habermas postulates in Between Facts and Norms—and is entitled to do so as long as the press remains free and critical. It is precisely this press that the man of letters Habermas seeks to put on a leash in A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere—at least in what he denounces as its “excesses”.
Habermas lent his voice to a culture of the “agitated” society—a culture of incessant debate in which the activist has experienced a curious renaissance.
Habermas has problematized, indeed denounced, the “anonymous intimacy” of new media—a position that seems at least strikingly forgetful of tradition, since not a few paradigmatic works of political philosophy were published anonymously for good reason. Habermas’s New Structural Transformation is the vision of a social-democratic totalitarianism. This comes as a surprise only to those who have overlooked Habermas’s drift toward system conformity. By the 1990s, at the latest, it had become impossible to miss.
