Jürgen Habermas, the great defender of deliberative democracy, lived up to its demands: he never feared changing his mind

by Emilie Prattico  BIO

Jürgen Habermas at the philosophical faculty of Frankfurt University, Germany, in January 1969. All photos by Max Scheler/Süddeutsche Zeitung/Alamy

is senior director of strategy at the creative consultancy BrightHouse in France, and an affiliate researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in Sweden.

Edited byNigel Warburton

Jürgen Habermas died on 14 March 2026, in the German town of Starnberg, aged 96. Every fall, from the mid-1990s into the late-2000s, he would come to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois to teach and give talks, a visit that a dedicated group of students looked forward to every fall term. The year that has stayed with me is 2004, when he taught what he’d spelled out in Between Facts and Norms (1992), his opus applying his theory to democratic politics. Law, philosophy, history, political science: students spanned many disciplines to come watch the famous German scholar every week, dressed in Wrangler jeans and a tweed jacket, expose his theory of deliberative politics in his unmistakable nasal voice, thick German accent, and impeccable English. Max Weber and the Frankfurt School, which were intimate to him, since he’d been Theodor Adorno’s research assistant in the 1950s, came to life in his speech and then in schemas and figures in chalk as he theorised about them.

I understood almost none of it at first: words I’d read were coming to life in the room, spoken by their author, and still not resolving into sense. After several lectures, the shape came into focus: this wasn’t just Between Facts and Norms being rebuilt in public, but decades of work arriving at a single place. Since The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas had been arguing that reason survives in modern life only as something people do together, that is, by giving each other reasons and staying open to being moved by them, rather than by force, money or tradition. Between Facts and Norms was that idea turned toward law and democracy directly: a state counts as legitimate only when its laws could in principle be justified to everyone bound by them, through exactly that kind of open exchange. I’d watched that argument take root in a decades-long intellectual history. Thinking is a practice, it involves owing each other explanations, questions, answers. It is not a fast process, and doing it in public, out loud, in front of a room, is what makes it worthwhile.

I attended all of Habermas’s seminars during my time at Northwestern with great interest and, to be honest, a sense of awe. One day, the topic of the weekly seminar was inclusion, and I had argued, with the timid conviction of a green graduate student, that deliberative publics ought to be designed for inclusion, and that entry into these publics required that members accept the terms of deliberation themselves. ‘Well, we can tell that Ms Prattico really is a Catholic in the strict, universalist sense,’ was not the answer I expected – and what took me by surprise wasn’t that he’d made a joke of my religion, but that he’d seen me as a person with a history and a set of unexamined beliefs, something he’d noticed only by teaching me.

After the seminars, the class would sometimes go out for drinks. It was on one of these occasions that I understood where the joke had come from. I’d asked him what it had been like arriving in the US as a visiting professor for the first time, at the New School for Social Research in the autumn of 1967, which decades earlier had served as a refuge for scholars fleeing the same Germany in which he’d grown up. It was the start of a long habit of crossing the Atlantic: Princeton four years later, for the Gauss Lectures where he first tried out the turn toward language that would eventually become his theory of communicative action; then, decades on, Northwestern, where I got to sit in the room.

Habermas answered my question by going back further than any of that. He’d been raised Lutheran. Visiting the US in the 1960s and ’70s, he’d been introduced to the Quakers, and something in their small meetings had stayed with him, specifically the way they sought unity with everyone present. When he came to describe the conditions under which people could reason together as equals, he said he heard an echo of those meetings: conditions that hold only when everyone who could be affected by a norm isn’t just included but has a voice, can object, and speaks with sincerity. In those conditions, which go far beyond mere inclusion, the only constraint left on discourse is ‘the unforced force of the better argument’, as he put it in Justification and Application (1993). It didn’t feel like something he’d have said at the podium.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), his seminal work originally published in German, made an argument about something concrete: 18th-century coffeehouses, salons........

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