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There is a particular kind of intellectual courage that consists not of grand gestures or romantic rebellion but of something far more demanding: the stubborn, lifelong insistence that human beings are capable of reasoning their way to a better world. Jürgen Habermas, who died on Saturday at the age of 96 in Starnberg, Germany, possessed that courage in abundance. In an era that has grown increasingly comfortable with irrationalism, tribal identity, and contempt for expertise, his death feels less like the closing of a chapter and more like the extinguishing of a lamp.

Habermas was arguably the most consequential philosopher of the postwar era—a period that badly needed philosophers. Not only was he among the most cited scholars in the humanities and the recipient of virtually every major prize his field could bestow, but his ideas shaped constitutional law scholarship, the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, and the decades-long debate over what a legitimate European Union might look like. Taken together, this represents a form of real-world consequence most philosophers never come close to achieving.

There is a particular kind of intellectual courage that consists not of grand gestures or romantic rebellion but of something far more demanding: the stubborn, lifelong insistence that human beings are capable of reasoning their way to a better world. Jürgen Habermas, who died on Saturday at the age of 96 in Starnberg, Germany, possessed that courage in abundance. In an era that has grown increasingly comfortable with irrationalism, tribal identity, and contempt for expertise, his death feels less like the closing of a chapter and more like the extinguishing of a lamp.

Habermas was arguably the most consequential philosopher of the postwar era—a period that badly needed philosophers. Not only was he among the most cited scholars in the humanities and the recipient of virtually every major prize his field could bestow, but his ideas shaped constitutional law scholarship, the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, and the decades-long debate over what a legitimate European Union might look like. Taken together, this represents a form of real-world consequence most philosophers never come close to achieving.

He was born in 1929 in Düsseldorf, at a moment when Germany was sleepwalking toward catastrophe. As a boy, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth, as nearly all German boys of his generation were. He would later recall the collapse of Nazism, when he was a teenager,........

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