Despite its canonical name, the Frankfurt School is not a school. It is, at least according to my former teacher, the critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi, a constellation. For a century, this scholarly constellation has pursued the intellectual endeavour of critique. Critique here is not the “thumbs down” or “blocking” exercised on social media. It is the wild aspiration to describe reality in a way that transforms it.

Jürgen Habermas, who died on 14 March 2026 at the age of 96, was a fixed star in this constellation. He set the compass for several generations of mostly German and North American thinkers. Habermas was incredibly prolific, with more than 40 books to his name, and very charismatic. There was an intensity, a concentration to Habermas’s thought and dialogue that his writings convey only poorly. The thundering polemics he brought to public debates also seem a far cry from the consensus-oriented discourse ethics he is known for.

But consensus-oriented discourse ethics by itself is perhaps not the best way to pin down Habermas’s position. Sure, he can be taken as a bourgeois thinker whose liberal complacency betrayed the radicalism of the previous exiled Frankfurt generation. He also sidelined feminist research and boycotted Michel Foucault’s concept of the imbrication of knowledge with power, by insisting that there was such a thing as domination-free discourse. This picture makes you wonder whether he even belongs to the camp of critique. But it is partly a caricature.

At the beginning of his career, Habermas was deemed too radically leftwing by Max Horkheimer, the then director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Only Theodor Adorno’s........

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