Jürgen Habermas may be the foremost intellectual in Europe. Since the 1960s his scholarship has set research agendas in philosophy, sociology, and history, while his newspaper articles and interviews have steered public debates on topics from the memory of the Holocaust to the Iraq War. He may also be the foremost intellectual of Europe, advocating for the continent’s economic and political integration.
In recent years, as that integration has stalled, one might have expected Habermas’s public interventions to gain in urgency. Instead, the opposite has happened: Although he has been as philosophically and politically productive as ever, his work has seemed to lose its relevance. Political developments against which he has struggled for decades, from populist nationalism to the erosion of the welfare state, seem more intractable than ever, while problems on which his political theory has little purchase, such as the growing influence within Europe of an illiberal and undemocratic China, appear ever more pressing. Still eminent in the academy but increasingly marginal outside it, the theorist best known for his notion of the “public sphere,” in which intellectuals influence politics by shaping public opinion, risks becoming the most compelling counterexample to his own ideal.
