Despite the weight and authority of his school of origin—the “critical theory” of Adorno and Horkheimer—the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas established itself from the outset as a distinct and independent theoretical undertaking. The young doctoral student from Düsseldorf, working on his dissertation on the “public sphere,” was carving out his own direction in rethinking the relationship with the Enlightenment legacy, with Kant, Hegel, and Marx. That direction required a break with negative thought and with the radical critique of the Enlightenment—in which the Frankfurt masters saw the paradoxical source of calculative reason, of a distorted instrumentalization of human relations, and of the monstrosities of fascism and communism, of Hitler and Stalin.
It was for this reason that when Habermas published Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit in 1962—The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere — Adorno distanced himself from the work. In a certain sense, he was right to do so: the book broke with his thinking, even as it bore, unmistakably, the mark of a critique of commodification, human degradation, and the blind authoritarianism that had afflicted and continued to afflict Europe. Yet it gave that critique a positive inflection—not an abandonment of the Enlightenment project, but a renewal of it. And it did so in an original and innovative way, with a theoretical force—and soon a political one too, as befitted the public intellectual Habermas already was—that would go on to regenerate the very idea of democracy.
The first step in Habermas’s new direction is precisely this: the discovery of the public sphere as a vital dimension of representative systems. In feudal societies, “representation” meant the symbolic display of power’s grandeur—the Versailles of Louis XIV. But with the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, a free space emerged, autonomous from the power of the State: a public life where knowledge was exchanged, information circulated, newspapers were born, and ideas were debated in coffeehouses, salons, and clubs. In place of the one-way performance of political power, there arose free conversation, dialogue, and open debate. This emancipated realm is the birthplace of public opinion. And it is only from here—from this lung that supplies it with oxygen—that modern democracy can be conceived and begin its existence.
Of this genesis of public opinion, Habermas’s work traces a history so influential as to prompt a reinterpretation of the French Revolution itself and of English political history: if France is the chosen home of the philosophes and the salons éclairés, the country where Pierre Bayle first formulated the idea of modernity as a “régime de la critique,” England provides democracy with the Lockean matrix of the “law of opinion.”
The advent of mass media distorts the public sphere by tending to transform the public of an idealized enlightened conversation into an audience of consumers. The commercialization of the public sphere erodes its autonomy, producing, in a sense, a return to those forms of representation of power (Versailles) that the French Revolution had swept away. This is why, in Habermas’s terms, one can speak both of a “refeudalization” of the public dimension and of a “colonization of lifeworlds“—that is, the invasion of private, familial, and personal imaginative domains by commercial forces. Public deliberation and justice itself would never be the same with the advent of mass television.
Here Habermas was taking up and developing a theme dear to the critical theory of Adorno (and Walter Benjamin, with his notion of technical and industrial “reproducibility”), but he was not doing so to hurl an anathema against the entire present or to defer salvation to some distant eschatological horizon. His critical analysis is radical, and would provide inspiration throughout the century and beyond for studies on mass media and their social effects, as well as for studies on democracy and its deformations (from Karl Popper to Bobbio and Sartori—it is curious that the conservative Nicola Matteucci was the one who most openly acknowledged his debt to Habermas in his theory of the State).
But Habermas’s is a realistic, reformist, therapeutic perspective. The Enlightenment ideal would always retain for him a normative value: the conditions of autonomy and freedom must be defended when threatened and recreated when crushed by instrumental, commercial, or political pressures. The debt that modernity owes to the Enlightenment is thus not cancelled but, in a sense, renewed; that incomplete, contested, interrupted project remains a task to be taken up and continued indefinitely.
That early work contained in embryo the entirety of Habermas’s subsequent philosophical output, but it was a project that needed to be developed in two directions: toward a deliberative theory of modern democracy, in its complex forms of representation and organized pluralism, and toward a theory of knowledge. The philosopher would carry out this work through the successive stages of Knowledge and Human Interests (1971) and then The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). In later works he would bring into focus the deliberative foundation of law (with Between Facts and Norms, 1992), always proceeding from a conception of rationality grounded in intersubjective relations based on human communication through language. He would then return to the theme of his first work—which, he said, remains his greatest editorial success (a fortunate doctoral thesis!)—and did so in his final years, productive to the last, with the thoroughly up-to-date A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Polity Press, 2023, translated by Ciaran Cronin), devoted to social media and the crumbling and fragmentation of the public sphere, afflicted by “echo chambers.” Unfortunately, Habermas observed, there is now almost no professional distinction between producers and consumers of information, with the consequence that partisan polarization devours the deliberative dimension of democracies.
Habermas never abandoned the idea that the “public sphere”—understood as an arena of free and autonomous exchange of opinions among subjects of equal dignity, effectively placed in a position to discuss matters relevant to the constitutional community—is irreplaceable. The permanent aim of politics, of legislation, of our duties as citizens should always be the defense and regeneration of the Öffentlichkeit, whether through antitrust measures, the protection of freedom and pluralism, or the defense of citizens from fear and extreme need.
The normative deficit—the insufficiency of moral resources, that is, of the energies needed to reactivate a healthy public sphere—has driven Habermas’s thought over the last twenty years in a direction he himself defined as “postsecular,” in a celebrated dialogue with Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004. Faced with the evident impoverishment of the cohesive resources of the liberal State and with the paradox that, by its very nature, a free and secular order does not generate morality but consumes it, Habermas, in a series of works devoted to the dialogue between religion and knowledge, looked to the possibility of summoning to the aid of modern societies the normative values—the “semantic deposits,” as he called them—held within faith, on the condition, naturally, that the institutional principles of secularism are not violated.
Moreover, faced with the widespread dismay at the faltering of democracy across much of the world, even in its most historically established settings, the philosopher posed an even more radical question about the “normative deficit” and about where, in the history of human thought, the energies that have driven progress—from barbarism and chaos to the charter of human rights and the Kantian dream of a universally triumphant democracy—were found and gathered. And he reexamined the history of philosophy in a project that occupied him for the ten years between his eightieth and ninetieth birthdays. A history of thought that is a history of humanity’s normative stock—in simpler terms, of the moral force that has driven progress from the Axial Age (Buddha, Confucius, the Upanishads, Socrates) through the Roman Empire, the Christian Middle Ages, up to the Enlightenment and our own day. (Also a History of Philosophy. The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge, Polity Press, 2024.) These are the last pages—dense and numerous—of his legacy.
He returned to the point often, even recently, with the same energy as in 1962: “We see how, even in the West, democratic procedures and institutions can be reduced to empty facades if they lack a functioning public sphere.” And when confronted with the “centrifugal” tendencies of social media, he insisted on the need to “focus attention” on a few politically important issues—something that requires the ability to choose. And he concluded that “in the vast sea of digital noise” nothing can save us but “the skills of good old journalism, no less indispensable today than yesterday.”
This article was originally published on the Italian newspaper Repubblica, on March 15, 2026.
Cover photo: Internationally renowned German philosopher Juergen Habermas speaks to journalists in an auditorium of the Philosophical School of Athens on August 6, 2013 (Photo by Louisa Gouliamaki / AFP)
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