Rebuilding the Frankfurt School's Bridge From Theory to Practice: Jürgen Habermas's Rehabilitation of Critical Theory

Abstract

The relationship between theory and practice is a key philosophical problem. Since Plato reacted to the sentencing of Socrates to death by separating the contemplative work of theory from the active work of politics, most philosophers—even most political philosophers—have argued that practical applications “are not prerequisites of a theory” (Schmidtz 2006, p. 27). Today, these questions have reemerged, as philosophers and political theorists increasingly have to justify the value of theory to both public officials in order to obtain funding and to students worried about their employment prospects. This has led some political philosophers to claim that they should “have socio-political ambitions for their work” (Bright 2021). Going even further, proponents of public philosophy argue that political thinkers “have a responsibility to take matters of public policy seriously” (Wolff 2011, p. 1).

The critical theory tradition associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research, hereafter IfS) in Frankfurt is a touchstone for these debates. Established in 1923 following the worker's uprisings that accompanied the end of the Great War in Germany, the Frankfurt Circle sought to understand why the proletarian revolution had failed. Driven by Karl Marx's project of “ruthless criticism of the existing order” (in Tucker 1978, p. 788), the first generation sought to fulfill Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach by building a bridge between theory and practice.

However, on its hundredth anniversary, there is widespread agreement that “critical theory today is rarely practiced in the sense intended by its founders” (Ibsen 2022, p. 3). This “domestication” (Thompson 2016) is often attributed to the “neo-idealist” linguistic paradigm Jürgen Habermas introduced in the 1970s. These critics allege that Habermas “abandoned” (Thornhill 2000, p. 173) the practical aspirations of the original paradigm of the Frankfurt School by creating a “philosophy which finds peace within itself… [that] has nothing to do with critical theory” (Rockmore 1989, p. 166). This scholarship presents Habermas as an apostate, who, despite learning from Theodor Adorno, “retreated into a kind of transcendentalism” that sealed critical theory off from practice. Raymond Geuss (1981, p. 94) thus concludes that the Frankfurt School is “better off” insofar as it is “closer to Adorno…than to Habermas,” while other prominent commentators see Habermas's approach as “an insidious ruse” (Butler 1995, p. 56).

This article pushes back against this tendency to pit “the ‘good’ Adorno against the ‘bad’ Habermas” (Specter 2019, p. 322). In contrast to the dominant interpretation outlined above, I argue that the Frankfurt School's retreat from practice actually dates back to the first generation itself, which lost its faith in the possibility of political change following the rise of National Socialism. I therefore agree with Martin Jay (2023, p. 15) that the Frankfurt School has consistently “struggled to bridge the gap between radical theory and transformative praxis.” Far from severing the critical theory from practice, I show that Habermas engages in theoretically informed praxis as a public intellectual (see also Verovšek 2021b, 2022, Forthcoming). Whereas the first generation struggled to conceptualize the link between theory and practice after realizing that the proletariat could no longer serve as a vehicle for the revolution, in his work Habermas builds a theoretically consistent bridge between these two spheres via his theory of the public sphere as well as his activities to improve the quality of public debate within it.

My argument proceeds on two levels. First, I contend that Habermas reinvigorates Horkheimer's (1972, p. 199) commitment to “theory dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life” by shifting its focus away from economic, psychological, and cultural categories in favor of an institutional approach that takes politics seriously. More specifically, I show that Habermas identifies the modern democratic public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) as the “force within [the concrete historical situation] able to stimulate change” that Horkheimer (1972, pp. 188–243) was ultimately unable to locate.

Second, I demonstrate that Habermas has sought to shape practice as “an engaged public intellectual in the very same ‘political public sphere’ that he theorized as a philosopher” (Pensky 2013, p. 31). By highlighting Habermas's understudied Kleine politische Schriften (“short political writings”), my basic thesis is that far from having to be drawn out “into a ‘real’ world from which it otherwise remains isolated” (Whyman 2019), Habermas himself has already applied his critical theory to real politics. In my view, Habermas's philosophy not only provides a bridge between theory and practice but also serves as a model for how philosophers can act as engaged public intellectuals.

I start by outlining the practical ambitions of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and explain the failure of this original paradigm, which ultimately dissolves into quietist despair (2). I then reconstruct the bridge that Habermas creates between theory and practice in his communicative form of critical theory based on the public sphere (3). An analysis of his mediated account of political influence based on the philosopher as a public intellectual follows (4). I also provide a brief case study of his engagement as a public intellectual, focusing on his interventions in the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute) of the 1970s (5). In the conclusion, I address Marxist critiques of Habermas for allegedly having given up on the kind of large-scale, revolutionary social transformation of the first generation's early years. I also reflect on how Habermas's solution to the problem of theory and practice fits within the recent “applied turn” (Bright 2021) in political theory and on what his work as a public intellectual means for his place in the tradition of the Frankfurt School.

In his 1930 inaugural lecture, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” Horkheimer lays out a new path for the IfS, which under its initial director, Carl Grünberg, had been devoted to the empirical study of the history of the worker's movement. While Horkheimer (1993, pp. 4, 9, 7) retains the Institute's Marxist orientation, he focuses on providing “insight into the meaning of our own existence.” He argues that a concern for the pathologies of the present must place social philosophy at the center of its activities, since this approach “raises us above the standpoint of the empirical observer.” Such a Sozialphilosophie aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice by confronting the researcher “with the yearning (Sehnsucht) for a new interpretation of a life trapped by its individual striving for happiness.”

In order to satisfy this longing, Horkheimer (1993, p. 11) identifies three main areas of study: “the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals, and the changes in the realm of culture.” At this point, he is still committed to Marx's understanding of the proletariat as the subject–object of history, whose actions will overthrow private ownership of the means of production. The philosophically informed empirical program of study he laid out in 1930 was supposed to help to bring about concrete economic, psychological, and social transformation raising the class consciousness of the working class, thus linking philosophy to social change. “Tasks of the Institute” thus analyzes why the revolution has not occurred and identifies possible responses.

Unfortunately, over the course of the 1930s, “the more empirical material the IfS gathered, the more Horkheimer lost confidence in the proletariat's ability to act as the conscious subject of history” (Ibsen 2022, p. 47). As a result, Horkheimer penned a new programmatic statement in 1937. In “Traditional and Critical Theory,” he shifted the Frankfurt School away from a Marxist focus on social transformation toward “the theoretical side of the struggle to rid the world of existing misery” (Horkheimer 2009a, p. 131). Critical theory instead comes to be guided by a Kantian understanding of Kritik that focuses on reason—most notably instrumental reason (Zweckrationalität)—to clarify the limits and conditions of knowledge (Benhabib 1986, p. 170ff). Horkheimer would later retreat even from this epistemological understanding of critical theory, moving toward an appeal to “an entirely other [ein ganz Anderes] than this world.” Before his death, Horkheimer (in Jay 1973, p. xii) abandoned any theoretically grounded faith in the ability of humanity to rescue itself from the pathologies of the postwar world, noting, “The hope that earthly terror does not possess the last word is, to be sure, a non-scientific wish.”

Horkheimer's loss of faith in the proletariat—as well as the precarious position of the Institute during its time in exile in the United States—resulted in an embrace of ever more conservative political positions. As a result, the thinkers associated with the IfS in the first generation “gravitated steadily toward adaptation to the local bourgeois order,” as many of its members “remain[ed] silent about the major political questions of the day” (Anderson 1976, p. 33). This quietist turn was a result of the fact that “Horkheimer remained unwilling to risk the possible repercussions of political activism or even political engagement with the major topics of the era” (Wheatland 2009, p. 99).

Insofar as they wanted to engage in practice during this period, the thinkers associated with the Institute had done so in ways that had little connection to their philosophical commitments. For many of them, the desire to engage in the struggle against Nazism led them to accept employment in the US government during World War II. For example, while Leo Löwenthal and Friedrich Pollock found work at the Office of War Information and the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice, respectively, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer all joined the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. This embrace of a form of practice disconnected from the philosophy they had previously developed has led Gabriel Rockhill (2021, p. 121) to speak pejoratively of the transformation of the Frankfurt into the “Washington School.”

In contrast to the practical turn taken by many of his colleagues, during this period, Adorno developed a more negativistic paradigm of critical theory that moves away from any aspiration to changing the world, at least in the short term. In Minima Moralia, he famously claimed, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (Adorno 2005, p. 39). On this interpretation, contemporary reality is “wrong (falsch)” in the sense that it claims to be something that it is not. It is not just wrong empirically but also normatively, as it cannot be rationally justified. This conclusion is rooted in Adorno's (2006, pp. 11–12) diagnosis of late capitalism as a “totally administered world,” in which “the web of society has become so dense, the growing concentration of the economy, the executive and the bureaucracy has advanced to such an extent that people are reduced more and more to the status of functions.” Given the extent of this structural domination, he contends that resistance is futile.

As a result, philosophy can no longer “capture the totality of reality in the power of thought,” since “[n]o justifying reason could find itself in a reality, whose order and form strikes down every demand of reason” (Adorno 2003, p. 326). Instead, all it can do is to “mee[t] the hope for a future right and just reality in the form of residues and traces.” Under such conditions, practice becomes impossible: “Praxis without theory, lagging behind the most advanced state of cognition, cannot but fail… False praxis is no praxis” (1973, p. 265). Theory on Adorno's interpretation therefore becomes a mere Flaschenpost (“message in a bottle”) for future generations.

In light of this diagnosis, Adorno came to believe that “the act of writing…replaces social practice” (Hohendahl 1997, p. 225). This is not to say that he severed ties from practice completely. On the contrary, after his return to Germany in 1949, Adorno became one of the leading public intellectuals of the early Federal Republic acting as something of a “public dissident” (Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 273). However, despite his attempts to promote the democratization of postwar Germany so that “people really experience it as their cause, and so consider themselves agents [Subjecte] of the process” (1986, p. 118), Adorno was unable to integrate his political and his philosophical commitments in a consistent manner. Instead he (2005, p. 133) was forced to conclude, “Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong.”

Habermas learned a lot from Adorno during his time at the IfS between 1956 and 1959, as well as over the course of their subsequent friendship and intellectual collaboration, which lasted until Adorno's death in 1969. In particular, Habermas adopts his mentor's limited interpretation of “what theory can accomplish.” Adorno was committed to the idea that the era of grand theorizing was over. Instead, on his understanding of “philosophy as interpretation (Deutung)” (Adorno 2003, p. 326), theory can only deal with particular phenomena as it has lost access to universal meaning or truth. Habermas agrees, noting that modern philosophy must realize that it can no longer “offe[r] a theory that's supposed to be able to solve all of life's problems” (1994, p. 113).

The fact that philosophy can only act as a “stand-in” or “interpreter,” however, does not mean that it is practically useless. On the contrary, Habermas (2018, p. 147) observes that it can still help translate what “the knowledge we have acquired about the world (including the human being as another entity in the world) means ‘for us.’” This position implies that the search for truth must remain separate from direct interventions in society and politics. While philosophers retain the right to intervene in public affairs as citizens, on Habermas's understanding they betray their professional vocation—and theory itself—if they delude themselves into believing that philosophy “can facilitate better, more effective political action on its own” (McKean 2016, p. 881).

In taking this position, Habermas is engaging in a delicate balancing act. On one level, he follows Adorno by arguing that theory “effects change precisely by remaining itself” (cited in Richter and Adorno 2002, p. 19). However, he also rejects Horkheimer's “opportunistic conformity, which was at odds with the critical tradition…he embodied” (quoted in Jeffries 2017, p. 297). While he wants to engage in political discourse as a public intellectual, Habermas also needs to build the bridge between theory and practice that Adorno failed to provide so that he can ensure that his “account of human emancipation actually enables dominated groups and individuals to emancipate themselves in practice” (Ibsen 2022, p. 14).

In order to do so while also ensuring that “all decisions of consequence will depend on the practical discourse of the participants,” Habermas (2018, p. 152) first has to develop a theory that will allow philosophy to “play a public role in the context of a liberal political culture.” This is the purpose of his theory of the public sphere, in which the members of a political community legitimize coercive law through their participation in practical discourse. Although this move represents a shift in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, Habermas (1992, p. 196) does not see it as a departure from critical theory's underlying goals, noting, “Adorno had intuitions which could be and should be saved within a very different, communicative framework. But he himself was deaf to that alternative.” This account of communicative action in the public sphere gives Habermas the theoretical tools he needs to develop and embody his own particular conception of the proper role of the philosopher as a public intellectual.

As the leader of the “second generation” of the Frankfurt School, Habermas reorients the Frankfurt School away from “the basic premise of Critical Theory, as it took shape during the early 1940s, the premise that instrumental reason has gained such dominance that there is really no way out of a total blindness (Verblendungszusammenhang), in which insight is achieved only in flashes by isolated individuals” (Habermas 1981a, pp. 517, 513). Unlike the founders, Habermas explicitly sees himself as a product of American “reeducation,” for whom “‘democracy’, not Anglo-Saxon liberalism, was the magic word.” In light of the fundamental rupture of 1945 (Verovšek 2020), Habermas demonstrates a commitment and faith in the institutions of modern constitutional democracy that Horkheimer, Adorno, and the first generation lacked.

This project starts in his habilitation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), where Habermas develops an account of democratic legitimacy that is based on informed discussion and reasoned agreement, rather than on institutional divisions of power, majoritarian elections, or other mechanisms of fair aggregation. He defines the public sphere—his key theoretical innovation—as a place where “citizens behave as a public body…confer[ing] in an unrestricted fashion…about matters of general interest” (Habermas 1974, p. 49). This development, which enabled citizens to exercise functions of both publicity by informing themselves of what their government was doing as well as critique of those decisions, was crucial in “taming the Leviathan of the absolutist state” (Specter 2010, p. 27). Eventually, the historical constellation of the bourgeois public sphere of eighteenth-century Europe came to be presented in the form of public opinion, where “the authority of the better argument could assert itself” (Habermas 1989b, p. 36).

On this “talk-” rather than “vote-centric” (Chambers 2003, p. 308) model, “sovereignty makes itself felt in the power of public discourses” (Habermas 1996, p. 486). In his later work, Habermas builds on this argument to develop a normative ideal of modern democracy, which is legitimized by the quality of the debates that occur within its public sphere and the responsiveness of formal state institutions to these informal deliberations. He (1996, p. 485) notes that “democratic procedure can lead to a rational will-formation…insofar as organized opinion-formation, which leads to accountable decisions within government bodies, remains permeable to the free-floating values, issues, contributions, and arguments of a surrounding political communication that, as such, cannot be organized as a whole.” As long as the channels between informal debates that occur within civil society are able to work their way into the formal, institutionally mediated decision-making procedures of the state, Habermas concludes that “the public sphere functions as a normative concept.”

This transformation of what was initially a historical constellation into a normative concept gives Habermas a measuring stick against which he can evaluate and critique the present. In the second half of Structural Transformation, he therefore argues that the social conditions that enabled the creation of the bourgeois public sphere had changed in the postwar era, as public institutions gradually inserted themselves into this intermediate space, replacing reasoned, critical publicity with the “manipulative publicity” (Habermas 1989b, p. 178) of modern public opinion. These trends are accelerated with the advent of the corporate news media, which competes for attention in order to sell advertising, rather than actually serving as a conduit for the dissemination of information and opinion formation. In light of these developments, Habermas (1961, p. 28) fears that the democracies of post-1945 western Europe were becoming “elective monarchies,” in which “scientifically-led marketing makes political advertising into a component of a consumer culture for un-political individuals (Unpolitische).”

Although Structural Transformation shares a negative diagnosis of the present with Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment—in particular given its decidedly pessimistic evaluation of contemporary trends in popular culture—it is not a Verfallsgeschichte (“history of decline”). While the latter traces the problems of the modern world back to the rise of instrumental rationality in ancient Greece and leaves no way out of the aporia it creates, the former maintains a belief that “the function of the public sphere in ensuring the sustainability of democratic political community” (Habermas 2022, p. 146) can be reclaimed by allowing “the authority of the better argument” (Habermas 1989b, p. 36) to assert itself in line with the ideals of the Enlightenment.

In Structural Transformation, Habermas thus rebuilds the bridge between theory and practice by providing a practical criterion of validity that explains and describes the problems within contemporary forms of life while also identifing the agents who can resolve them by giving them the tools to self-consciously conceptualize the proper responses to their predicament. In this way, Habermas not only rehabilitates Horkheimer's original paradigm of critical theory but also “responds to the limitations of Adorno's negativist paradigm and seeks to grasp the emancipatory potential of the new-founded constitutional-democratic order of post-war Europe” (Ibsen 2022, p. 19). While Habermas develops these ideas further in his later work (especially in Between Facts and Norms [1996], where he grounds the legitimacy of democratic law in the quality of discourses in the public sphere), these ideas are already present in nuce in his Habilitationsschrift. In addition to developing this theory of the public sphere, over the course of his career, Habermas (2009a, p. 52) has also sought to put it into practice by working as a public intellectual who seeks to “broaden the spectrum of relevant arguments” in order to improve the quality of opinion formation in the public sphere.

Unlike Adorno (1973, pp. xi–xii), who believed that philosophy could only live on as a hope for the future “because the moment to realize it was missed,” Habermas contends that theory still has an important role to play in changing the world in the present. Like Adorno, Habermas explicitly rejects the idea that it is possible to create an “ideal theory of how we should act, and then in a second step…applies that ideal theory to the action of political agents” (Geuss 2008, p. 8), which is often attributed to him by his critics. On the contrary, Habermas (1974, p. 32) notes that philosophy cannot determine the appropriate “organization of processes of enlightenment” or the “selection of appropriate strategies…[for] the conduct of the political struggle.” In his (1974, p. 33) words, “Decisions for the political struggle cannot at the outset be justified theoretically and then be carried out organizationally.”

There are two reasons for Habermas's refusal to endorse philosophy as action-guiding. First, politically speaking, Habermas argues that the direct application of ideas to practice denies the agency of individuals and social movements. Following Marx (cited in Tucker 1978, p. 299), who declined to “writ[e] recepies …for the cook-shops of the future,” Habermas argues that philosophers should not restrict the democratic opinion- and will-formation of participants in actual historical struggles by seeking to define the “proper” conclusions of their deliberations ahead of time. In line with his theory of the democratic public sphere, he contends that from a normative perspective, “the political struggle can only be legitimately conducted under the precondition that all decisions of consequence will depend on the practical discourse of the participants” (1974, p. 34).

Second, given the complexity of the modern world and the development of different spheres of life that operate with their own autonomous internal logics, Habermas (1987, p. I.364) also argues that philosophy could not determine the proper conclusions of such political deliberations in the public sphere even if it wanted to since it can no longer assume that it is “capable of thinking…the totality that is hypostatized as the world order.” In rejecting the idea that theory is capable of conceptualizing “the world-historical process” in thought, Habermas is again building on Adorno. He concludes that “one has to talk about philosophical questions philosophically…[and] political questions politically. One has to know which discourse one is operating in and what tools one is employing” (1994, p. 114).

These two objections beg an important question: What role can philosophy play in the social struggle given that “here too, and especially here, there is no privileged access to truth” (1974, p. 34)? Habermas's deflationary answer is that philosophy should develop theories based on statements that “can stand up to scientific discourse” (1974, p. 32). In this sense, he agrees with Adorno (in Richter and Adorno 2002, p. 19) that theory “effects change precisely by remaining itself.” Habermas (1994, p. 99) therefore warns philosophers “not to expect any more or anything different from theories than what they can achieve—and that's little enough.” As an institutionalized profession pursued within the modern university, he is committed to the idea that philosophy is engaged in the search for “scientific truth as a form of truth which can be defined only in terms of methodological research” (Hohendahl 1997, p. 218).

This limited view of philosophy does not, however, mean that Habermas believes that theorists must remain isolated in the Ivory Tower or that they cannot take part in social and political struggles. However, in order to respect the political and epistemological autonomy of the participants, philosophers must embrace the limitations of their role. Theoretically speaking, they can therefore apply their professional insight only by “systematically considering the interrelations between different social value spheres” in order “to make explicit a potential that already exists in contemporary society” (Dahms 1997, pp. 195, 207). This is what Habermas does in his theory of the public sphere and his endorsement of the legal–political institutions of postwar constitutional democracy.

Although philosophers can do little to aid political practice as philosophers, they can still participate in politics as citizens. However, in order to do so, they will have to give up the “elitist desires for authority (elitären Herrschaftswünsche)” (Adorno 1963, p. 32) that led so many philosophers in Germany to support Hitler during the Third Reich. Rather than acting as “teachers of the nation” (1992, p. 199), Habermas argues that theorists must embrace their equality as citizens, who have a right to contribute arguments to debates in the public sphere just like anyone else.

Due to the “complex network of social value spheres characterized by different ‘inner logics’” (Dahms 1997, p. 208), Habermas does not believe that philosophers directly can “connec[t] political reality and political theory” (Rossi 2010, p. 510). Rather, he argues that they can legitimately participate in practice only as public intellectuals, who are “limited to mobilising the relevant issues, information and arguments for public disputes” so that their fellow citizens can “make their own more or less rational decisions in the voting booth in the light of competing opinions” (in Czingon et al. 2020, pp. 9–10). The theorist as a public intellectual is thus neither an idealist philosopher laying out blueprints for the future nor a democratic underlabourer “argu[ing] about the ideas and values that politicians ought to draw on in responding to the world” (Philp 2010, p. 482). Instead, the philosopher as a public intellectual “cannot rely on anything except the strength and precision of his or her arguments, and must renounce all other forms of authority and narcissism” (Habermas 2018, pp. 56–57).

Because their theoretical livelihood is governed by “professional involvement in contexts of meaning that have an autonomous logic of their own,” philosophers have the advantage of not being dependent on the public sphere for their livelihood. As a result of this “privilege of having to deal with public issues only as a sideline,” they retain the ability to “speak truth to power” (Habermas 1989a, p. 87) to a greater degree than journalists or political commentators. Because they engage in public not as part of their Beruf (profession) but instead only as a Nebenberuf (a “secondary occupation” or “side hustle”), Habermas argues that public intellectuals are able to speak out “when current events are threatening to spin out of control—but then promptly, as an early warning system” (1989a, p. 87).

Habermas (1992, p. 127) acknowledges that this distinction is not “the kind of division of labour in which one thing has nothing to do with the other.” Obviously, the skills of philosophers in argumentation do not disappear when they act as public intellectuals. Nor is their professional status irrelevant in their Nebenberuf, as it can still help them to get their voices heard in the first place. What is important at an analytical level, however, is that philosophers themselves understand this distinction and resist claiming any normative authority over their fellow citizens. This means that they cannot base their public appeals on their supposed expertise but instead must play the role of a “dilettante who questions the demarcation lines between various realms and provokes through his or her very lack of expertise” (Biebricher 2011, p. 713).

Habermas also wants to ensure his philosophical commitments are compatible with his approach to practice. If he cannot make this connection, then he cannot claim to have fulfilled the Frankfurt School's “original commitment to the idea that the purpose of social and political theory is ultimately to enable such large-scale human emancipation in practice” (Ibsen 2022, p. 15). Responding to critics who argue that his “form of critical theory apparently abandons the aim of fundamental social change” (Rockmore 1989, p. 165), he notes, “What annoys me terribly, what gets to me, is the aggressiveness of people who do not see the role-differentiation in me” (Habermas 1992, p. 127).

For Habermas, this distinction is rooted in his reading of Immanuel Kant's distinction between the public and the private use of reason. In “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) Kant (1991, pp. 55, 57) concludes that it is the duty (Pflicht) of the “man of learning addressing the entire reading public” to “use his own reason and speak in his own person” in the service of the enlightenment of society as a whole. Habermas (1992, p. 73) argues that as public intellectuals, philosophers can make use of their public reason to “intervene on behalf of rights that have been violated and truths that have been suppressed, reforms that are overdue and progress that has been delayed.” However, as philosophers, who are “acting on a commission imposed from outside” by their universities and who are often “employed by the government for public ends” (Kant 1991, pp. 57, 56), Habermas argues that they are limited to engaging in research oriented toward truth via disciplinary norms of peer review and to educating their students in line with their contract.

In Habermas's view, public intellectuals are not called to propose policies, but to defend the feedback loop “between an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society” in which “the generative flow of communication is from the periphery to the center” (2006, p. 412). They thus play a key agenda-setting function of the informal public sphere, ensuring that the public opinions generated within this anarchic realm have “benefited from information, thoughtfulness, and the exchange ideas.” While they occasionally may take stances that are partisan—as some of Habermas's interventions undoubtedly are—this is only a problem when these positions become “detached from civil society inputs and can no longer claim to be responding to a flow of information from the periphery to the center” (Chambers 2017, p. 273). In this sense, the public intellectual is a “discourse agent whose activity appeals to the moral or context-transcendent normative dimension of public discourse…a supporter of principles of universal justice and right, of critical debate and democratic rule, with a deep suspicion concerning conventional identities and traditions of all kinds” (Pensky 1999, p. 216).

By engaging in political debate, Habermas (1996, p. xl) has sought to performatively “refute the objection that the theory of communicative action is blind to institutional reality.” He does so while also maintaining a strict separation between his roles as an academic philosopher and a public intellectual to ensure that theory “does not sabotag[e] thinking and thereby itself” (Freyenhagen 2014, p. 878). In the next section, I examine how Habermas has sought to put his philosophical ideas into practice in the famous debate over the meaning of the Holocaust for German national identity and foreign policy that took place in the mid-1980s.

Habermas's engagement in the public debate thus sets him apart from his forebears, as Horkheimer and much of the first generation of the Frankfurt School maintained a certain “distance from the explosive political events of the time” (Abromheit 2011, p. 42). Marcuse is an exception to this rule, given his engagement with the student movement and the New Left in the United States. However, much like Adorno, who engaged in the public sphere of the postwar Federal Republic with radio addresses and public-facing essays, Marcuse was also unable to integrate these activities with his negativistic philosophical commitments. By contrast, Habermas's practice in the public sphere is consistent with his theory of it.

As a public intellectual, Habermas has intervened in almost every important social and political debate in the history of the FRG, weighing in on issues like the democratization of higher education, rearmament, asylum policy, and (re)unification, to name just a few. However, the best example of his practice of the public intellectual occurred in the mid-1980s, when he set off a public controversy regarding what he saw as attempts by the conservative government of Helmuth Kohl to “normalize” the Nazi past by allowing the FRG to “regain national self-confidence through an identification with a past which can be agreed upon” (Habermas 1988, p. 27). In what became known as the Historikerstreit Habermas reacted to attempts by a number of German historians to detoxify the Holocaust by arguing that it should not be singled out as particularly evil, but instead should be understood in light of the other mass murders perpetuated in the twentieth century (see also Verovšek 2023).

Habermas set off this dispute after Ernst Nolte (1987, p. 45) sought to excuse what he called “Hitler's “Asiatic” act (“asiatische” Tat)’’ by arguing that the Holocaust was not new, but instead built on historical precedents established in Eastern Europe. In particular, he feared that the Germans would “themselves be potential victims of an ‘“Asiatic” deed’ given that both the gulag and ‘Bolshevik “class murder”’ (Klassenmord)” more generally predated the ‘racial murder’ (Rassenmord) of National Socialism.” In light of these historical considerations, many of which were published as public interventions in newspapers and were supported by the government, Nolte and his fellow travelers claimed that “the curtain should finally be brought down (ein Schlussstrich sollte endlich gezogen werden)” on the history of the Third Reich.

In “A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Eine Art Schadensabwicklung),” an essay originally published in the German weekly Die Zeit on 11 June 1986, Habermas (1988, pp. 28, 27) set off the Historikerstreit by alerting the public to the attempts of these revisionist conservative historians “to provide suitably positive pasts for the legitimation requirements of the present political system.” More specifically, he saw them as playing an important “role in the process of ideological planning” for the conservative government of Helmut Kohl, which had adopted a new approach to the politics of memory that not only sought to establish “a Federal Republic firmly anchored in the Atlantic community of value,” but also one that would “confirm that we Germans had always been on the right side in the struggle against the Bolshevist enemy.”

In his article, Habermas drew the attention of Germany's reading public to a new trend in conservative historical scholarship, which he saw as laying the ideological foundations for this new interpretation of postwar memory. He categorically rejects Nolte's (1987, p. 36) apologia for the Holocaust as well as his reference to “the so-called annihilation of the Jews,” a statement that borders on Holocaust denial. However, what is ultimately important to Habermas are not Nolte's claims as such, but their political role within the revisionist politics of memory pursued by Kohl's government.

Habermas also highlights the contributions of Michael Stürmer (1983, pp. 86, 84), who argues that the FRG needs a more traditional national memory to forge “that higher provision of meaning (Sinnstiftung) which only nation and patriotism—after religion—have hitherto been capable of achieving,” if it is to avoid the dangers of value pluralism, which leads “sooner or later to social civil war.” Stürmer (1987, pp. 36, 38) thus treats history not only as a topic of research (Wissenschaft) but also as a legitimate site of ideological contestation, since “whoever fills the memories, coins the concepts and interprets the past will win the future.” Noting Germany's crucial place in the “arc of the Atlantic system of defense (Verteidigungsbogen des atlantischen Systems),” he argues that historical revisionism away from dangerous ideas of guilt and shame is both “morally legitimate and politically necessary” in the fight against communism.

Next, Habermas turns to Hillgruber and his book, Two Kinds of Demise: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry. Habermas sees this monograph as part of the same ideological project he identified in the work of Stürmer and Nolte. His first objection is with regard to the title, which focuses on the active “shattering” of the Third Reich by the Allies but portrays the murder of European Judaism as something that simply passively “came to an end” without any active engagement or effort by the Nazi regime.

Habermas also takes Hillgruber to task for his identification Germany's interests with the interests of the Wehrmacht (the Nazi armed forces). He (1988, p. 30) is incensed by Hillgruber's view of “events from the point of view of the courageous soldier [and] of the desperate civilian population,” a perspective that ignores that of German Jews, Roma, and other minorities targeted by the Nazis, as well as of other dissidents and erstwhile Germans made stateless by the Nazi regime. He is also dismayed by Hillgruber's presentation of the “noble” German soldier. For Habermas, the decision to identify solely with the limited perspective of participants in the conflict is no excuse for avoiding broader issues of morality and guilt. Not only does this do an injustice to the abilities of academic historians, it also makes them mere tools for use in ideological political battles over collective memory.

Following this initial salvo, the Historikerstreit quickly degenerated into a series of ad hominem arguments. Much of the discussion was carried out by historians arguing about the scientific merits of Nolte's claims regarding the non-singularity of Auschwitz. But this misses the crux of Habermas's objections. After all, he (1988, p. 29) admits upfront that “[a]s someone without specialist qualifications,” he only feels comfortable weighing in on these issues since the arguments in question are “obviously aimed at the layman.” What gives Habermas the right to comment on these issues is not any disciplinary or academic mandate, but the fact that as a German, “I am thus making the self-observations of a patient who undergoes a revisionist operation on his historical consciousness.” The public character of these contributions as well as their political instrumentalization means that they are issues that cannot simply be left to experts, but must be open to public debate and deliberation if they are to meet the standards of democratic legitimation.

As Habermas (1987, pp. 251–252) notes in another article originally published in the newspaper Die Zeit in 1986, “The pompous outrage over an alleged mixing of politics and science shunts the issue onto a completely wrong track…. [I]t is not a question of disputes about scientific theory, it is not about questions of value-free analysis—it is about the public use of history.” Insofar as their arguments are directed toward the “question of the inner continuity of the German Republic and of its foreign-political predictability,” which Stürmer (1987, p. 38) explicitly states is the “politically necessary” goal of his work, then Habermas argues that these ideas are fair game for non-specialists.

From the perspective of deliberative democratic theory, Habermas (1988, p. 38) argues that debates about the political meaning of the past cannot be based on an “image of history which is closed or indeed ordained by government historians.” Instead, the public meaning of the past must be open for debate in the democratic public sphere. While specialists have a role to play in correcting misunderstandings and presenting arguments to the public, they cannot short-circuit the open nature of debate in a public sphere defined by the equality of all voices.

Politically speaking, Habermas (1988, p. 27) fears that the Kohl government was planning to institute a new memory policy that would present Germany as having “always been on the right side in the struggle against the Bolshevist enemy” by emphasizing the Third Reich's fight against the USSR at the expense of the crimes it committed as part of the “Final Solution (Endlösung).” These fears were realized on May 5, 1985, when Kohl invited US President Ronald Reagan to join in laying a wreath in remembrance of the dead and the end of World War II at the Kolmeshöhe Military Cemetery in Bitburg. This event, which included a handshake between German and American generals, was supposed to signal the reconciliation of the two states that had fought against each other before 1945, but who were now allies in the Cold War. However, the plan backfired after it was revealed that 49 members of the Schutzstaffel (SS), some of whom had participated in the massacre of civilians and some of whom might even have worked at concentration camps, were also interred there.

While this might have been an oversight, the fact that the two leaders arrived in Bitburg after visiting the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen made it clear that this action was designed to “[take] away the singularity of the Nazi crimes.” He therefore interpreted this event as part of a broader shift toward “the planning of new memorials and new museum buildings” that would entrench the revisionist perspective in German historical consciousness. In light of this broader background, Habermas (1988, p. 28) saw “the services of historians” like Stürmer, Hillgruber, and Nolte as part of a broader attempt by the government to foster “the bureaucratic production of meaning (Erzeugung von Sinn)” through a revisionist politics of memory.

If these changes had been the product of a broad, open societal debate where all voices were heard, Habermas would not have been satisfied with the result, but he would have accepted it as legitimate. However, this was not the case; instead, Kohl made an executive decision to deploy symbolic politics to change the country's past without any public deliberation by inviting Reagan to a wreath-laying ceremony that aimed to exonerate collaborators in the Holocaust from their status as perpetrators. As Habermas (1985, p. 267) observes, “Today the tasks of social integration and self-understanding are no longer matters for the political system. There are good reasons for us not having a Kaiser or a Hindenburg any more. The public sphere should refuse to tolerate spiritual-moral leadership (geistig-moralische Führung) from those in high office.”

The issue of Holocaust remembrance is thus a perfect candidate for Habermas in his role as a public intellectual, since voicing his objections moved it out from the back rooms of the executive branch, where historians like Nolte and Stürmer were able to bring their historical ideas into public policy without proper scrutiny, into the public sphere, where this approach was ultimately rejected. In this sense, Habermas's participation in the Historians’ Debate allowed him to fulfill his role as a public intellectual, who intervenes by “mobilising the relevant issues, information and arguments for public disputes” (in Czingon et al. 2020, p. 9). By acting as a public intellectual in a way that is consistent with the bridge to practice that Habermas builds in his theoretical account of democratic legitimacy based on the public sphere, Thomas Biebricher (2011, p. 719) points out that the “void left by Habermas the philosopher is filled by Habermas the intellectual.”

I have argued that in his work, Habermas has rehabilitated Horkheimer's original paradigm of critical theory by moving away from the more pessimistic, “ambiguous normative concerns with ‘not being governed like that,’ the ‘subversion of binary oppositions’” (Ibsen 2022, p. 4) that have dominated critical theory since the mid-1930s. In its place, he develops the model of the philosopher as a public intellectual, who works to improve the quality of public debate by ensuring that the best arguments and voices that would otherwise unjustly be overlooked are given due hearing. This is what Habermas (1990, p. 19) refers to as his “radical reformism.” In line with his understanding of the meaning of socialism following the failure of actually existing communism, this approach focuses on ensuring that “the socially integrating force of solidarity should be in a position to stake its claim against the other social forces, money and administrative power, through a wide range of democratic forums and institutions.”

Many of Habermas's more radical critics from the Marxist left will not be satisfied with this solution. It is indeed true that with his turn to the model of the public intellectual, Habermas has given up on the kind of large-scale, revolutionary social transformation that the first generation was committed to in the early years of the Institute for Social Research (Geuss 1981; Rockmore 1989; Thompson 2016; Thornhill 2000). However, this does not mean that he has de-politicized critical theory or that it has become a solitary enterprise that is incapable of “respond[ing] to the real suffering in our world” (Whyman 2019).

On the contrary, far from being quietist or incapable of action, Habermas's approach seeks to bring about social change by helping to discursively mobilize popular opinion formation within civil society and the public sphere to address the pathologies of the present not only through the political institutions of will-formation but also via “sub-institutional, extra-parliamentary forms of protest” (Habermas 1981b, p. 33). This reflects Habermas's conviction that the classic Marxist model of revolution—as well as “neo-Leninist” (Geuss 2008, p. 99) approaches that seek to pull the people along in order to realize their “real interests”—is not legitimate or fit for purpose under the conditions of late democratic capitalism. Instead, in line with his observation that “without social movements nothing moves (ohne soziale Bewegungen bewegt sich nichts)” (Habermas 2009b, p. 199), this approach seeks to mobilize not only public opinion but also public protest and social movements in order to achieve transformation through what he in Maoist language refers to as a long “march through the institutions” (Habermas 1989a, p. 184).

My argument also has a number of other important implications. The first regards the proper role of philosophy in public debate. In recent years, a movement of self-styled “political realists” has argued that political philosophers not only need to “theorise about the distinctive forces that shape real politics” (Rossi and Sleat 2014, p. 689) but also “need to to be genuine participants in public debate” (Waldron 1993, p. 61). Arguing along similar lines, so-called “public philosophers” argue that political theorists should be prepared to “provide guidance when special interests collide” (Wolff and de-Shalit 2007, p. 97), while supporters of “democratic underlabouring” argue that the expertise of philosophers in analyzing arguments should give them a “specific place in the political and policymaking process” (Swift and White 2008, p. 54).

By contrast, Habermas mediates theory and practice indirectly (Verovšek 2021a). While he does not deny that philosophers should engage in public, he argues that they must do so in ways that respect the equality of citizens in the public sphere. In his view, philosophers can use their epistemological and normative insights to increase the quality of deliberation in the public sphere. However, they cannot determine in advance what is to be done, what shape social change should take, or how it can be achieved. Instead, the answers to these questions can only result from actual discourses in which the philosopher may participate as a public intellectual, making use of the same media that is available to all other citizens.

Second, my argument has implications for how we interpret Habermas as a critical theorist. A number of commentators have attacked Habermas's thought as “just another form of traditional theory, but crucially without an emancipatory potential” (Rockmore 2015, p. 192). This perspective overlooks both the theoretical bridge that Habermas has constructed in his philosophical writings and how he put these ideas into practice as a public intellectual. Paying attention to Habermas's political writings thus demonstrates that he “has single-mindedly worked to bring his theoretical and his political writing into a steadily closer relation with each other” (Pensky 1995, p. 67). As a result, his theoretical commitments are consistent with his political interventions to an extent that is not the case with Adorno, who was never able to provide a theoretically consistent bridge between his practical work as a public intellectual and his approach to critical theory.

Finally, my basic thesis addresses Habermas's place within the Frankfurt School. Habermas himself has expressed a certain ambivalence toward this tradition of thought, noting that “it is not possible to have an unbroken identification with critical theory.” He has even claimed, “For me there was no critical theory” (cited in Honneth et al. 1981, pp. 6, 7). In addition to the critics I have engaged with above, even more sympathetic scholars like Roman Yos (2020) have argued that “Habermas cannot simply be considered an epigone of the founders of the Frankfurt school.”

It is true that there are clear differences between his communicative paradigm and both Horkheimer's original approach and Adorno's negativistic critical theory. However, my basic thesis is that it is precisely the fact that Habermas has managed to not only rebuild the bridge between theory and practice that initially drove the thinkers of the first generation to develop critical theory but the fact that he has also managed to embody it by acting as a public intellectual in the selfsame public sphere that forms the core of his philosophy that makes him the rightful heir to this tradition. In this sense, I agree with Stefan Müller-Doohm's (2016, pp. 4–5) conclusion that the “intransigence Habermas displays in his public political interventions is a crucial reason why he is still counted as a member of the circle around Horkheimer and Adorno.”

However, I want to push the argument further. Not only does Habermas's commitment to political change cement his place within the Frankfurt School; in fact, Habermas has been able to integrate critical theory with practice in a way that the first generation was unable to do. As a result, far from being criticized for abandoning its basic premises, Habermas's work should be praised for fulfilling the original promise of critical theory.