1. Introduction
Jürgen Habermas died on 14 March 2026 at
the age of 96. He was a critical theorist who, in a transdisciplinary manner,
influenced thought across diverse fields, including anthropology, discourse
analysis, media and communication studies, international relations, legal
studies, pedagogy, philosophy, political science, religious studies, and
sociology. Given that communication is his key concept, the question arises of
how media and communication studies can build on Habermas’s legacy. This
article provides some ideas on this question.
My reflections on Habermas’s legacy for
media and communication studies are structured around his notions of
communication (section 2), the public sphere (section 3), and (anti-)fascism
(section 4).
2. Communication
Habermas differs
from other Frankfurt School theorists – such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor
W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Axel Honneth – as well as from many other critical theorists, in emphasising the
importance of communication in a critical theory of society. For humans and
society to exist and survive, they must not only work, eat, drink, and sleep,
but also reproduce their sociality, which they do in and through communication.
Communication is part of what Marx (1844, 299) terms humans’ “social being” when
he writes that the human being “is the social being”.
One
need not agree with Habermas’s concept of communication, but his theory of
communication is a milestone that anyone theorising communication cannot and
should not ignore. We need to work through Habermas’s works to in update the
critical notion of communication.
Communication
played a role in Habermas’s entire oeuvre. Already in his dissertation on
Schelling, he discusses Feuerbach’s comments on Hegel and stresses that in
society, dialectical mediation is a communication process: “Dialectical mediation must therefore be taken literally as a means of
communication; it is only possible through the act of presenting and
demonstrating something to others“
(Habermas 1954, 43). And also in his final works, communication remained a key
concern. For example, in his last major book Also a History of Philosophy,
Habermas clarifies the relationship of individual, culture, and society that
are related in a recursive manner:
“In
the lifeworld, ‘society‘, as the set of binding social relations between
communicatively socialized subjects, is interlinked with the other two
components, namely, ‘culture‘ and ‘person‘. By the latter two components, I
understand the intersubjectively shared and culturally stored knowledge of a
society, on the one hand, and the embodied competencies of its individual
members, on the other. In the interplay between these three components, the
lifeworld provides in advance the ‘resources‘ on which communicative action
draws. From the perspective of social science, it is advisable to examine
social reproduction both under the aspect of the systemic reproduction of the
infrastructures that stabilize the functional connection linking the network of
interactions to the social and natural environments, and from the viewpoint of
the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld (in which, however, the systems
remain anchored even when they become differentiated beyond its horizon). The
symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld can be imagined as a circular process.
In dealing with each other and the world, communicative actors draw upon the
resources of the lifeworld, which, in the mode of intuitive ‘know-how‘, provide
them in turn with cultural knowledge, social bonds and acquired ‘capabilities‘.
The subjects thus ‘empowered‘ by the lifeworld renew, for their part, the only
performatively present components of the lifeworld through their
interpretations and learning processes by grappling with the challenges in
the-for them-objective world“ (Habermas 2023b, 84-85).
Habermas developed
his theory of communication step by step, culminating in The Theory of
Communicative Action (Habermas 1984, 1987), his major contribution to
communication theory. A key feature of Habermas’s approach is what he terms a
“media dualism” (Habermas 1987, 281), which means that in his model of society,
we find dualisms of communicative action and strategic action, social
integration and system integration, interaction and work, lifeworld and system,
as well as language and steering media. In his essay “Labor and Interaction”,
Habermas traces the dualism of work and interaction back to Hegel’s Jena
philosophy. For Hegel, spirit “is an organization of two equally original
media” – “language and labor” (Habermas 1968/1974,
152). Habermas poses a key problem for social theory and communication theory:
how the economy and culture, work and communication, the material and the
symbolic are related. Any critical theory of society, communication, or culture
needs to ask how the economic and the cultural are related. It is Habermas’s
achievement that he constantly reminds us of this question in his works. Of
course, his solution is not the only possible one, as one can also conceive of
the relationship as dialectical, so that there is the work character of
communication and the communicative character of work: work is communicative,
and communication is the work process of producing and reproducing sociality
(see Fuchs 2016, 2020). The long quote cited above illustrates that Habermas’s
dualism is not a strict one, but an interactive dualism. Society, including the
economy, is “interlinked” (Habermas 2023b, 84) with communicative action. The
difference from other approaches that see production as primary and as
grounding society is that, for Habermas, work and interaction are two “equally
original” (Habermas 1968/1974, 152) and “equally significant patterns of
dialectical relation” (142).
Habermas distinguishes between strategic
action (social action, oriented to success), instrumental action (non-social
action, oriented to success), and communicative action (social action, oriented
to reaching understanding) (Habermas 1984, 285: figure 14). What is
communicative action? For Habermas, “communicative action designates a type of
interaction that is coordinated through speech acts and does not
coincide with them“ (Habermas 1984, 101). Communicative action means that
at the “level of interpersonal relations“, “participants in communication come
to an understanding with one another about something in the world“ (293). The
validity claims of truth, truthfulness, understandability, and normative
rightness are necessary features of successful communicative action. Such
communicative action creates a joint understanding between actors about parts
of the world. Validity claims concern conditions of communication, but do not
imply that humans necessarily agree on the questions they discuss. Habermas (1998b,
18, 320-325, 326-329) distinguishes between weak and strong communicative
action. Weak communicative action is oriented toward understanding; strong
communicative action, toward reaching agreement (Habermas 1998b, 320).
Strategic communication uses language, but Habermas argues it does not do so in
a communicative way but “with an orientation toward consequences“
(Habermas 1998b, 326). Habermas (1998b, 317-320) argues that there are
communicative and non-communicative uses of language.
For Habermas, communication is oriented
toward a joint understanding of the world, which can, but need not, result in
consensus and agreement. For Habermas, there is a normative dimension of
communication, namely the goal of communicative rationality to advance peace,
freedom, and democracy, which is why his theory of communicative action has led
to his discourse ethics (Habermas 1990a, 1993) and a theory of democracy
(Habermas 1996). Discourse ethics is practical discourse aimed at reaching
agreement on normative questions: “Only those norms can claim to be valid that
meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as
participants in a practical discourse“ (Habermas 1990a, 66). “The utopian
perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the conditions for
the communicative sociation of individuals; it is built into the linguistic
mechanism of the reproduction of the species.“ (Habermas 1984, 398).
Overall, Habermas has a positive,
freedom-oriented understanding of communication. Let us assume that someone
anonymously issues a death threat over the Internet to someone else, saying
“You will be killed!“, to which the threatened person reacts by reporting the
death threat to the police and posting the message “Reported to the police! You
will be caught!”. For Habermas, such a threat is a linguistic strategic action
and not a communicative action. However, A uses symbols to convey to
B that A hates B and wants to kill B, to which B responds
by using symbols to indicate
that the police have been
informed. We have a recursive
social process where meaning is created by A in B and by B in A. There are no
reasons why we should not define this highly instrumental action as a form of
communication, too, an instrumental form of communication. Peace and conflict resolution
certainly require communication as part of diplomacy and negotiations, and
cannot exist without peace-oriented communication. But communication is also a
means of instilling fear, issuing threats, and announcing actual or potential
violence (Fuchs 2025).
Understanding communication today requires
starting and engaging with, reading, arguing with, against and beyond Habermas.
There is no critical theory of communication without Habermas.
3.
Instrumental Reason and the
Public Sphere
Building on Marx
and Lukács, the Frankfurt School draws a distinction between instrumental and
critical reason, a distinction that goes back to Horkheimer. Horkheimer
understands instrumental reason as “transformation of reason into a mere
instrument“ (Horkheimer 2004, 22). Humans are treated like things and turned into instruments for the advancement of
particularistic goals through the exploitation of their labour, the violent
suppression of their political will, or the attempted ideological instrumentation
of their consciousness (see Fuchs 2020, 362: figure 15.2).
Habermas develops his
theory of communicative action by engaging with Lukács‘s notion of reification
and Horkheimer and Adorno’s notions of
instrumental reason and the dialectic of enlightenment (Habermas 1984, part IV:
From Lukács to Adorno: Rationalization as Reification). For him, critical
reason is communicative reason that resists instrumental reason, which he
conceptualises as the colonisation of the lifeworld by the steering-media of
money (monetarisation and commodification, a process he bases on Marx) and
power (bureaucratisation, a process he bases on Weber). Habermas develops
theory dialectically by engaging closely with theories, working through them,
and sublating them, in the sense of preserving certain elements that are
uplifted to a new level, where they take on new meaning. By reading Habermas, one can learn to develop theory dialectically,
which is important for analysing communication and the social sciences and
humanities more generally.
Habermas argues that “Horkheimer and Adorno
failed to recognize the communicative rationality of the lifeworld” that “gives
an inner logic – and not merely the impotent rage of nature in revolt – to
resistance against the colonization of the lifeworld by the inner dynamics of
autonomous systems“ (Habermas 1987, 333). For
Habermas, “communicative reason“ has to do with “the linguistic medium
through which interactions are woven together and forms of life are structured”
(Habermas 1996, 3) and “the use of language
oriented to reaching understanding“ (Habermas 1987, 397).
Habermas’s concept of
the public sphere is where the antagonism between communicative and
instrumental reason becomes most significant for critical media and
communication studies. Habermas’s (1962/1991) habilitation
thesis The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society is his most read and most cited work. The public sphere is
society’s sphere of public communication where public opinions are produced,
reproduced, and differentiated. Therefore, it is the sphere where civil
society, social movements communicating dissatisfaction and political demands,
the news media and journalism, citizens’ public debates, and political
engagement take place. The public sphere is the sphere of political
communication beyond formal political institutions. The notion of the public
sphere helps us to analyse if and how promises of society are undermined by its
own logic. It stands in the tradition of Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment
and negative dialectic, which analyses “the recoil of enlightenment into
mythology” (Adorno 2004, 34) and how “progress is reverting to regression”
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xviii). Habermasian critique of the public sphere
analyses whether or not promises of an enlightened, free, democratic, and
progressive public sphere are realised and if not, how they can and do turn
into their opposite, namely various forms of domination, including class rule,
patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc. “Under the conditions of a class society,
bourgeois democracy thus from its very inception contradicted essential
premises of its self-understanding“ (Habermas 1962/1991, 428). Habermas does
not abandon the enlightenment values of freedom, equality, and solidarity, but
rather argues that they can only be properly realised in a radical democracy.
He is not an anti- or postmodern thinker but a thinker of a dialectical
modernity.
Habermas’s notion of the public
sphere has often been misunderstood and misinterpreted. The most common
criticism is that he idealises politics that are based on domination and
thereby leaves out the realities of the exploitation of workers, the oppression
of women, racism, (post-)colonialism, the non-Western world, etc. The collected
volume Habermas and the Public Sphere documents some scholars’
engagement with Habermas’s book and his response (Calhoun 1992). Habermas’s
concept of the public sphere is not an idealisation but an immanent critique
that proceeds in a Hegelian manner by comparing the political promises society
makes in the realm of public opinion formation to societal realities. It tests
whether a society that promises to realise democracy and freedom of speech
lives up to its own promises. The notion of the public sphere as a critical
theory concept is inherently tied to the ideas of the refeudalisation of the
public sphere and the colonisation of the lifeworld. The refeudalised
public sphere and the colonisation of the lifeworld are two key concepts for
the future of critical media and communication studies as they are expressions
of the critique of the political economy of communication and the media and
allow us to analyse how political-economic power undermines communication
systems’ democratic promises and realities (Fuchs 2014, 2023).
Feudal societies have public spheres, too. In them, the
“feudal powers” of “the Church, the prince, and the nobility” (Habermas
1962/1991, 11) represent their power and ideology before the people, so that
there is what Habermas terms “representative publicness” (Habermas 1962/1991,
11), an undemocratic public sphere. The enlightenment has promised to advance
democracy. Habermas (1962/1991) argues that unequal access to educational and
material resources undermines the public sphere’s promises of freedom of speech
and public opinion (227), and that centralised political and economic power
undermines the promises of the freedom of association and assembly (228).
Refeudalisation of the public sphere means that powerful organisations use
their power to dominate the formation of public opinion, becoming modern-day
emperors and churches. In a refeudalised public
sphere, big political and economic organisations
“enjoy an oligopoly of the publicistically effective
and politically relevant formation of assemblies and associations” (Habermas
1962/1991, 228).
Advertising and public relations aim at “strengthening the
prestige of one’s own position” (Habermas 1962/1991, 200) by utilising
resources such as money, political influence, and reputation, which results in
a “pseudo-public sphere” (162) and a “staged or manipulatively manufactured
public sphere” (217). Based on Rüdiger
Altmann, Habermas terms this process “communification”
(201): public communication is shaped by the logic of commodities and
commodification. Habermas’s concern is that economic and political power are
utilised to dominate opinion formation and that the power of the better
argument and the power of facts, what Kant termed “the public use of reason”
(28),
become secondary or completely unimportant. Public relations “has affinity with
feudal publicity” so that the “public sphere becomes
the court before whose public prestige can be displayed rather than in which
public critical debate is carried on“
(200-201). “The aura of personally represented
authority returns as an aspect of publicity” (200).
In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas
reconceptualises the notion of refeudalisation as colonisation of the
lifeworld. Colonisation of the lifeworld means that “communicative
action is replaced by media-steered interaction, when language, in its
function of coordinating action, is replaced by media
such as money and power” (Habermas 1987, 374-375). If
we consider how algorithmically driven reputation systems, bot- and
AI-generated online communication, and targeted online advertising shape
Internet communication, it becomes evident that Habermasian public sphere
analysis is central to the critical analysis of Internet platforms and the
media in the age of digital capitalism.
Habermasian public sphere analysis is a critical examination
of the economic and political censorship of public communication, an important
aspect of Marx’s analysis of the press. Habermas updated Marx’s critique of
censorship and stands in the tradition of Marxian cultural analysis. Marx was an important influence on Habermas’s
works: “Although Immanuel Kant
plays a far greater and more fundamental role in Habermas’s work than Karl
Marx, Marx remains essential nonetheless. For it is precisely this combination
– already characteristic of Marx – of a normatively ambitious philosophy of
reason with an empirical theory of society that distinguishes Habermas’s work
from that of his contemporaries, from sociologists such as Luhmann as well as
philosophers such as John Rawls“ (Brunkhorst 2026, 53).
Marx argues against the economic,
political, and ideological censorship of the press. In respect to censorship by
money and capital (economic censorship), Marx’s (1842, 175) concern is that the
“primary freedom of the press
lies in not being a trade”. In addition, he criticises the
political censorship of the press by state power and ideological censorship by
media propaganda: “A free press that is bad does not correspond to its essence.
The censored press with its hypocrisy, its lack of character, its eunuch’s
language, its dog-like tail-wagging, merely realises the inner conditions of
its essential nature. The censored press remains bad even when it turns out
good products, for these products are good only insofar as they represent the
free press within the censored press, and insofar as it is not in their
character to be products of the censored press. The free press remains good
even when it produces bad products, for the latter are deviations from the
essential nature of the free press. […] The essence of the free press is
the characterful, rational, moral essence of freedom. The character of the
censored press is the characterless monster of unfreedom; it is a civilised
monster, a perfumed abortion“ (Marx 1842, 158). By ideological reporting, the media,
according to Marx, contribute to the circumstance that capitalism’s class “antagonism is
artificially kept alive and intensified“ (Marx 1870, 475).
Habermas focuses on economic and political power as a means
of censorship. He subsumes ideological power under political power. Culture,
the realm of ideas, and heteronomous culture, the realm of ideology, are not
merely subsystems of the political system but constitute a single domain of
society (Fuchs 2020). Ideology is not a prominent concept in Habermas‘s theory
of communication. Ideology is a key notion in critical theories of society and
culture and should, therefore, also feature prominently in a critical theory of
the public sphere. Ideology critique, for example, in the form of critical
discourse analysis (see Fairclough 2010 & Reisigl
and Wodak 2001, who regard Habermas’s public sphere
theory as a significant starting point), is an important aspect of public
sphere analysis.
Digital capitalism dominates the world of Internet platforms.
In contemporary world society, we are experiencing a transformation of digital
capitalism into fascist digital capitalism where authoritarian ideology
increasingly shapes ideology of and on the Internet (Fuchs 2024). Economically,
US and Chinese digital media corporations, the “digital giants”, constitute
monopolies and oligopolies that dominate digital media markets, including
online advertising, search engines, video- and image-sharing platforms,
microblogs, application software, generative AI, and digital hardware.
Politically, we have seen the tendency of the fusion of digital capital and
authoritarianism. Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful politician, has
created his own social media platform Truth Social. In October 2022, the
world’s richest person, Elon Musk, bought Twitter for US$ 44 billion and
renamed it X, which has become an online playground for the far right. The
number of Elon Musk’s X followers increased from 108 million in early October
2022 to 158 million a year later (October 2023) and 237 million in late-March
2026. Such
a large increase is not evidence, but an indication that the X algorithm may
have been changed to boost Musk’s visibility. The basic problem is that X and
other Internet platforms’ algorithms are private property whose source codes
and algorithms are closed sources that cannot be publicly scrutinised. X is
part of a feudalised public sphere that threatens democracy.
There is a lot of fake news and post-truth content on the
Internet, so increasingly it is not facts but ideology and emotions that
determine how citizens perceive the world. In a Eurobarometer survey conducted
in 2025, 67 per cent of respondents reported encountering fake news and
misinformation online at least once a week. In
algorithmic politics, algorithms and bots automate content creation and the
organisation of visibility and reputation online, so that machinic behaviour
replaces human activity, and it becomes difficult to identify which content is
human-made and truthful. World politics has become highly polarised, which
manifests itself in online echo chambers and the prevalence of online hatred.
Taken together, these arguments mean that online
communication is a highly colonised and feudalised public sphere in which
money, political power, and ideology shape visibility, reputation, and opinion
formation. Habermas’s public sphere critique is needed as a methodological and
theoretical approach to the critical analysis of the capitalist, authoritarian,
and manufactured digital public sphere.
Habermas critically analysed the digital public sphere. He
argues that the political-economic colonisation of the Internet has resulted in
a fragmented public sphere. In 2006, he wrote in the paper “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy
Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension?“ that “the
rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world“ tends to lead to
“the fragmentation of large but politically
focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated
issue publics“ (Habermas 2006, 423). On the occasion of the 60th
anniversary of his book Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
Habermas (2023a) reflected on its relevance and spoke of a new structural
transformation of the public sphere. He argues
that the tendency toward fragmented digital public spheres has advanced
further into “fragmented, self-enclosed
echo chambers” (37) and digital media that are “at the service of radical
right-wing networks” (38). According to Habermas, the “algorithmic
control of communication flows“ feeds “the concentration of market power of the large internet corporations”
(58) and advances the “commodification of lifeworld contexts” (47). Habermas updated his analysis of the
public sphere to the age of digital capitalism. He sees that digital capital,
digital fascism, and digital ideology threaten democracy and undermine the
democratic potentials of the digital public sphere (see also Fuchs 2024, 2023,
2014).
Habermas’s update of the
critique of the colonisation of the public sphere and public communication to
the digital age did not remain an abstract and empty shell. As a political
intervention, he endorsed the Public Service Media and Public Service Internet
Manifesto that demands to overcome the dominance of the capitalist Internet by
creating, supporting, and funding public service Internet platforms (Fuchs and
Unterberger 2021):
“Democracy and
digital democracy require Public Service Media. We call for the safeguarding of
the existence of Public Service Media. […] A democracy-enhancing Internet
requires Public Service Media becoming Public Service Internet platforms that
help to advance opportunities and equality in the society. We call for the
creation of the legal, economic and organisational foundations of such
platforms. […] Public Service Media content is distinctive from commercial
media and data companies. It addresses citizens, not consumers. […] Public
Service Media should continue to be supported and funded so that they have the
resources they need to realise and further develop their remit. In addition,
the Public Service Internet requires sustainable funding that is based on
mechanisms such as the licence fee, the Nordic model of a public service tax,
and transnational funding mechanisms. […] The Public Service Internet provides
opportunities for public debate, participation, and the advancement of social
cohesion. […] The Public Service Internet is based on Internet platforms
operated by a variety of Public Service Media, taking the public service remit
into the digital age in co-operation with civil society, individual media
users, citizens, and the creative, cultural and educational sector. The Public
Service Internet advances democracy. It enhances the public sphere. It supports
active citizenship by providing comprehensive information and analysis,
diversity of social representation and creative expression and extended
opportunities for participation. […] Now is the time for a Public Service
Internet and revitalised Public Service Media“ (Fuchs and Unterberger 2021, 7,
8, 10-11).
Habermas’s theory
of the public sphere is a critical theory of public political communication
that provides a framework for the critical analysis of the relationship between
political communication and mediated and digital forms of capitalism, fascism,
authoritarianism, and ideology. It will remain highly topical in the years and
decades to come.
4.
(Anti-)Fascism
Born on 18 June
1929, Jürgen Habermas was a toddler when Hitler came to power and a teenager
when the Nazi regime collapsed and the Second World War ended in 1945. His
commitment to and interest in humanism, democratic communication, and the
democratic public sphere can be explained by his anti-fascism, situated within
the context of German Nazi-fascism and post-war Germany. Habermas
described himself as “a product of ‘reeducation’”
(Müller-Doohm 2016, 33) and said that his generation
had a “desire to know. […] It was an intuitive understanding that separated the
critical part of our generation from our generation from the entrenched
mentality all around us: the Nazis had not been a foreign body in the fabric of
an ‘essentially healthy’ culture – not some horrible episode that was
fortunately over now. Rather, they were able to draw on the darkest legacy of
our culture” (Habermas 2026, 2).
Habermas’s life and works were shaped by a
radical humanism in response to and in opposition to the fascist danger. He
practised Adorno’s post-Auschwitz categorical imperative: “A new categorical
imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their
thoughts and actions, so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself so that nothing
similar will happen” (Adorno 2004, 365). Given the rise of new forms of
far-right extremism, Habermas’s life and works remind us of the importance of
intellectually challenging authoritarianism and fascism.
In philosophy, Habermas challenged the
works and intellectual legacy of the two Nazi Party members Martin Heidegger
and Carl Schmitt. In a 1935 lecture that, after its republication in 1953,
sparked public debate, Heidegger (2000, 213) spoke, in the context of National
Socialism, of the “inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the
encounter between global technology and modern man)”. Habermas (1953, 197) drew
the German public’s attention to his discovery that Heidegger in 1953
“publishes his words, in the meantime eighteen years old, about the greatness
and inner truth of National Socialism” and that it was therefore “time to think
with Heidegger against Heidegger”.
In the context of a
renewed interest in Carl Schmitt, both on the political right and left,
Habermas challenged Carl Schmitt’s political theory that he saw as profoundly
anti-democratic: “Schmitt's reasons for wanting to separate democracy, which he
conceives in terms of identity, from public discussion, which he attributes to
liberalism, are transparent. He wants to lay the conceptual groundwork for
detaching democratic will-formation from the universalist presuppositions of
general participation, limiting it to an ethnically homogeneous substratum of
the population, and reducing it to argument-free acclamation by immature
masses. Only thus can one envision a caesaristic and
ethnically homogeneous Führerdemokratie, a
democracy under a Führer, in which such a thing as ‘sovereignty’ would
be embodied“ (Habermas 1989, 139).
In the 1986
“Historians’ Dispute” (Historikerstreit), German intellectuals discussed the question of the singularity or non-singularity of the
Nazi system’s crimes. The German philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte, who
during the Nazi time was a student of Heidegger, claimed that Auschwitz was not
primarily driven by anti-Semitism, but a reaction to the Russian Revolution:
“Auschwitz is not primarily a result of traditional anti-Semitism and was not
just one more case of ‘genocide.‘ It was the fear-borne reaction to the acts of
annihilation that took place during the Russian Revolution. […] Was the
Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the
‘racial murder‘ of National Socialism?“ (Habermas et al. 1993, 13-14, 22).
Habermas responded that Nolte belittled the Nazis’ crimes. Nolte ”denies the
singularity of the Nazi atrocities“ (Habermas et al. 1993, 59). “The Nazi
crimes lose their singularity in that they are at least made comprehensible as
an answer to the (still extant) Bolshevist threats of annihilation. The
magnitude of Auschwitz shrinks to the format of technical innovation and is
explained on the basis of the ‘Asiatic‘ threat from an enemy that still stands
at our door“ (41).
Assuming a singularity
of Auschwitz and the Nazi system stresses the moral and
political guilt of the Nazis and the Nazi system.
Comparing this system, trying to causally
explain it as a reaction to something external, or arguing that something much
more horrific happened before or after in history, therefore excuses the Nazi
system. According to Habermas, Nolte justified the Nazi system and its crimes
by denying their singularity and causally reducing them to a reaction to
Bolshevism.
Commenting on the rise of
neo-authoritarianism, Habermas (2020, 31) wrote that the “convictions and
motives, upon which the Nazi regime drew, no longer belong to a past that one
can count by the intervening years: they have returned“ (31). He argued that in
Europe, “without European unification we will not overcome the unforseeable economic consequences so far of the pandemic
nor the right-wing populism at home and in the other member states of the EU“
(42).
Habermas is a critic of the postmodern turn
in the social sciences and humanities. He argues that postmodern theory
originates in the works of Nietzsche, who replaced the focus on reason and its
dialectics as well as truth by a focus on myth, a critique of reason without a
dialectic of enlightenment, and the will to power (Habermas 1990b, 86, 95-97,
104). Habermas sees a continuation of these Nietzschean characteristics in the
works of Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida, Foucault, and other postmodern thinkers.
Habermas characterises postmodern thinkers as young conservatives and
neo-conservatives who “justify an irreconcilable anti-modernism” (Habermas
1981, 13) and “on the basis of modernistic attitudes […] justiy
an irreconcilable antimodernism” (Habermas 1998a,
13).
The poststructuralist critique of truth has
been most clearly formulated by Michel Foucault and can be traced back to his
interpretation of Nietzsche. For Foucault, history does not have the potential
for freedom and reason: “Humanity doesn't gradually progress from combat to
combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally
replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules
and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (Foucault 1977, 151). Genealogy
would be directed against the notion of history as: 1. reminiscence or
recognition; 2. continuity or representative of a tradition; 3. truth and
knowledge (160). Foucault argues for the “sacrifice of the subject of
knowledge” (Foucault 1977, 162) and assumes that “all knowledge rests upon
injustice” (163).
There is no doubt that there are
organisations that use truth claims to discipline humans as workers in
companies, pupils in schools, detainees in death camps, etc. However, assuming
that any knowledge and truth necessarily foster disciplinary power and what
Foucault calls a regime of truth leaves out the possibility of emancipatory
knowledge, organisations, and societies. This becomes evident when Foucault
writes that “[e]very society has its régime of truth,
its ‘general politics’ of truth” that includes truth/falsity distinctions,
sanctions and the power of those who define what is true (Foucault 1980, 131)
Habermas criticises Foucault’s argument
that modern society, the humanities, and the social sciences have a “will to
knowledge and to truth” that necessarily turns into new forms of domination
(Habermas 1990b, 265). He questions the validity of “generalizing this will to knowing
self-mastery into a will to power per se and to postulate that all discourses
(by no means only the modern ones) can be shown to have the character of hidden
power and derive from practices of power“ (265). Foucault reverses “power's
truth-dependency into the power-dependency of truth“ (274) and renders the
dominative character as characteristic “for all times and all societies“
(270). Habermas criticises that Foucault
does not allow for a notion of progressive counter-power (281).
The postmodernist enmity towards
universalism and truth makes it impossible to envision a state of society, in
which there is universal wealth and well-being for all, and impossible to
assess such conditions as normatively desirable. Postmodernism lacks a
political vision. For Foucault, history is a sequence of ever newer forms of
domination. He sees no possibility for the realisation of universal reason and
happiness. That something emerges spontaneously from below does not guarantee
that it benefits all. Such a view of society does not accept the normative
judgement that fascism is false and needs to be avoided as valid because it
does not provide categories that allow normative assessments of such
conditions. Although Foucault opposes universalism and essentialism, he
essentialises human history as necessary dominative. Foucault’s method of
genealogy does not know the possibility of human and societal betterment,
wealth and equity for all.
Postmodern
scepticism
toward truth exhibits logical parallels with authoritarian attempts to dismiss
factual reality – presented by intellectuals, reputable news media, and
science – as mere ‘fake news‘.
This tendency has become known as post-truth
politics. Postmodern logic not just questions truth but extends towards the
fetishism of difference over commonality, identity over class, the post- and
transhuman over humanism, relativism and particularism over universalism,
fragmentation over totality, plurality over unity, micro over macro, etc. An
example of the nihilism inherent in postmodern theory and right-wing neoreactionary thought is that Nick Land, who, along with
Curtis Yarvin, founded the intellectual movement of the Dark Enlightenment and
Neo-Reaction (NRx), has been highly influenced by
postmodern thinkers such as Bataille, Deleuze, and Guattari.
He refers positively to Foucault’s view of politics: “The Clausewitzean formula
is notoriously inverted by Michel Foucault into the maxim ‘politics is war by other
means‘“ (Land 2021, 303). For both Land and Foucault, politics is necessarily
war (see Foucault 1978, 93), which is a Manichean view of society. Curtis Yarvin, who favours the creation of a CEO-monarchy where a
top-CEO runs a country in an authoritarian manner, Yarvin
argues that all universities and media have a left-wing agenda that they
declare to be the truth. Therefore, he calls ”mainstream academia,
journalism and education“ the Cathedral, institutions that “produce and
propagate the Synopsis" (Moldbug 2008 76). The
“Synopsis is the set of all reasonable ideas. As for the Cathedral, it is
simply the culmination of the great human quest for knowledge“ (76). Yarvin’s notion of the Cathedral parallels Foucault’s
attack on truth, arguing that all intellectuals are always left-wing and making
what are, in Yarvin’s view, false truths that are
ideologically distorted. Donald Trump has carried this analysis practically to
the end by constantly attacking “the Cathedral“ by claiming its members produce
fake news and creating his own Internet platform Truth Social that defines
itself as “the home for millions of people who have rejected the pervasive
censorship regime that has ensnared legacy social media and endangered free
speech online”. Fusing anti-universalism, particularism, relativism,
anti-humanism, and the logic of difference, Donald Trump is the leader of
postmodern authoritarianism. In contemporary relativist ideologies, truth is
not determined by facts and objective conditions but by ideology, emotions, and
feelings.
In the relativist notion of truth
characteristic of post-truth culture and politics, truth is what one feels
positive about, not what corresponds to the facts and the foundations of a good
society. Habermas (2008, 144) writes that a “post-truth democracy” is “no
longer […] a democracy”. Frederic Jameson (1991) argues that postmodernism is the
cultural logic of late capitalism, that is, “consumer or multinational
capitalism“ (Jameson 1983, 125). Habermas indicates that postmodernism is not
only the cultural logic of late capitalism but also that of late fascism.
What unites Habermas’s anti-fascist
analyses is the defence of the very ideas of the dialectic, universalism,
humanism, unity in diversity, and an alternative modernity, in opposition to
relativism, particularism, nihilism, fragmentation, and reactionary modernity,
which he saw as the intellectual foundations of fascist thought and practice.
We can learn from Habermas’s courageous and committed anti-fascism how
important it is to analyse and speak up against anti-humanism and
authoritarianism.
5. Habermas’s Legacy: Critique as Imperative
Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communication
is not merely a milestone – it is an inescapable reference for anyone engaging
critically with media and society. To theorise communication today is to
grapple with Habermas: to read with him, argue against him, and move beyond
him. There is no critical theory of communication without Habermas, yet the
task remains to update his project for our time. His insistence on
interrogating the interplay of economy and culture cuts to the heart of any
critique of communication. To understand communication now means beginning with
Habermas – and then pushing further.
For
Habermas (1990c), money, power and solidarity are three key structures of
society. For him, socialism means 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” (19). Socialist media politics in the tradition of
Habermas argues for and demands the creation and support of a wide range of
non-commercial, ideologically and politically autonomous media and Internet
platforms that enable “a radical-democratic universalization of interests
through institutions for the formation of public opinion and political will“
(21).
The refeudalised
public sphere and the colonisation of the lifeworld are not just historical
concepts; they are urgent frameworks for dissecting how political-economic
power distorts democratic promises. In an era of algorithmic reputation
systems, AI-driven discourse, and microtargeted advertising, Habermas’s
analysis of the public sphere becomes indispensable. It exposes how digital
capitalism reshapes communication, turning platforms into arenas of control,
ideology, and capitalist accumulation. Here, Habermas revisits Marx’s critique
of censorship and helps us extend this tradition to the age of digital
capitalism and digital fascism.
Habermas‘s theory of the public sphere
remains a vital tool – methodological and political – for dissecting the
authoritarian undercurrents of digital capitalism. It reveals the connections
between mediated communication and the forces of fascism, authoritarianism, and
late-modern ideology. Habermas’s anti-fascist interventions defend
universalism, humanism, and unity in diversity against the intellectual
foundations of fragmentation and reaction. His commitment teaches us that to
resist anti-humanism and authoritarianism is to reclaim the possibility of an
alternative modernity: rational, inclusive, and emancipatory.
Habermas was more than a theorist; he was a
public intellectual who demonstrated that a critical theory of society must
also be a critical theory of communication. His legacy is a call to action:
critique is not just thought – it is intervention. As a critical public
intellectual, he serves as a role model for future generations of critical
thinkers.
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About the Author
Christian
Fuchs
