Jürgen Habermas Lived to See a Return of the Fascist Ghosts He Once Helped Exorcise

Jürgen Habermas’s European Illusion

The late Jürgen Habermas saw Europe as a vehicle for a social democratic, postnational politics. But as the real European Union increasingly diverged from this ideal, Habermas’s thinking failed to reckon with the project’s fundamental limits.

Jürgen Habermas: A Lecture for Europe’s Conservatives

Jürgen Habermas, who died in Starnberg, Bavaria, on 14 March 2026 at the age of ninety-six, was more than Germany’s best-known living philosopher. He was, in the grand European sense, a public man of letters: a thinker who treated philosophy not as an academic refuge but as a civic vocation. At the centre of his work stood a bold proposition: that reason is not exhausted by calculation or domination. In The Structural Transformation of the Publi…

Jürgen Habermas lived to see a return of the fascist ghosts he once helped exorcise

The German philosopher, who has died aged 96, was young enough to carry no culpability for the Nazi era yet old enough to carry lifelong scars