The last time Seyla Benhabib saw Habermas was in December. “I went to visit him in Germany. He was, as always, perfectly aware of what is happening in the world,” recalls the Turkish-American philosopher. A professor at Columbia University in New York, known for her work on individual rights (among her books, The Rights of Others and Another Cosmopolitanism), she is considered one of Habermas’s most brilliant intellectual heirs. Here she reflects on how her teacher “taught us to take philosophy out of the lecture hall and into the world in which we live.”
Why was Habermas so central to twentieth-century thought?
“First of all, because of his courage. The courage of a boy who grew up in the Third Reich, during Nazism, and who spent his entire life asking himself: ‘How could this have happened? How can we prevent it from happening again?’ After the war, he came of age in a country that did not want to remember, that buried the past in silence and hard work, but he was able to challenge Heidegger, his claims about History and technology. Through critical theory, he never stopped carrying out this fundamental task: bringing philosophy into the present, teaching us to ask what repression is, what emancipatory potential our society holds, and other questions of this kind. I believe my own work on rights was born from this, combining his thought with that of Hannah Arendt.”
Participatory democracy, the public sphere, rational debate. What place do the watchwords of his thought hold in this historical moment, so tragic and conflict-ridden?
“The situation we find ourselves in is a radical transformation of the fundamental institutions that were built after the Second World War, and in many ways it is a regression. But I would stress that this is not merely a problem of geopolitics. It is rather a more radical threat to our very humanity, and the categories Habermas introduced in his philosophical reflection help us understand this.”
In what way?
“If we lose rational debate, if we can no longer distinguish between truth and propaganda, between truth and post-truth, we will not only lose our democracies—something fundamental in human socialization and in human nature will also be lost. We all see, for example, that President Trump has a narcissistic personality, that he does not distinguish between what he wants to believe and what is actually happening. This is dangerous, because it is fundamental for children, and then for adults, to be able to distinguish between themselves and their fantasies and the world. It seems to me that social media are undermining this epistemological capacity to ask where I end and where reality begins. If we lose that, if we lose the ability to engage with one another, to truly debate, this is a problem for democratic systems and also for the human psyche. I believe that in this too Habermas was brilliant: he was able to transform an autobiographical trait—having grown up as a child in a world dominated by the lies of Hitler’s propaganda—into a key for reading both the contemporary world and human nature.”
Returning to current events: do you think that in recent years he had lost faith in European unity, his great cause? How did he experience the recent distancing from the United States?
“I believe he had been worried since the appeal for a united Europe he signed with Derrida. It was 2003 and there was the war in Iraq: already then he felt that Europe’s weight was diminishing. Then more recently he was alarmed by the loosening of the transatlantic bond. But he believed in dialogue very deeply.”
What legacy does he leave to young philosophers, and to young people in general?
“He taught us never to stop thinking, and also to believe that this thinking matters, that we are not irrelevant. The world is not only that of realpolitik, of compromise and ideology. Philosophical thought has helped to build the institutions for this world. We must continue to be engaged.”
This article was originally published by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on March 15, 2026.
Photo: Európa Pont (Wikimedia Commons)
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