On Saturday, March 14, the distinguished German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died, at the age of 96. I have known of his work just about all my adult life (and even for some of my high school years), but my own education and trajectory as a philosopher intersected fairly little with his intellectual niche, at least not in ways that would have involved personal contact. And while I had been in the same room with him on several occasions, I only truly met him once, and that was on December 18, 2025, so a mere three months ago. And that was a meeting at his own home, in Starnberg, about an hour south of Munich.
The occasion is worth recounting. For some ten years now, I have been a member of a group based at INSEAD Business School in Fontainebleau which meets to reflect on the future of capitalism. Its name is Society for Progress, and the convener is INSEAD professor Subramanian (Subi) Rangan. One thing this group does is award medals—which we call Progress Medals, for distinguished ideas on the future of capitalism. They are awarded every few years, and then to several people. In 2025, one of those recipients was Habermas.
Habermas, however, has not traveled for some time, owing to his advanced age and fragility. So, on November 8, 2025, it was my great honor to give a combination of laudatio and acceptance speech, in his honor, in Fontainebleau. It is this text which, with some minor modifications, I include below. It is a basic introduction to the moral philosophy of Jürgen Habermas, and to his general importance. And it is written for a general audience, and thus might be of some use.
Rarely has one philosopher been as closely associated with the story of a particular polity as Habermas has been with the Federal Republic of Germany, and my speech developed that theme. At the same time, Habermas matters to the world because he articulated ideas about the rationality of discourse during a period when many people thought there was no such thing. My bottom line is that it is now badly needed that we—all of us—live up to Habermas’s legacy both as a citizen and as a thinker.
Since Habermas was not himself present at the ceremony in Fontainebleau, Subi and I went to visit him on December 18, 2025, after I had arranged the visit by phone. It was a lovely meeting, and both his friendliness and his mental clarity were impressive. As I told him then, when he apologized for some minor oversight, I would love to be 96 the way he was 96, able to live in his home of several decades by himself (after the death, the year before, of his wife of even more decades). After about an hour, he told us he was tired, and of course he had earned that. So we left, having given him the medal in this little three-person ceremony.
And that was the one and only time I encountered this distinguished contributor to the human spirit.
I will always be grateful to Subi for making this happen.
Remarks on the Work of Jürgen Habermas,
on the Occasion of His Being Awarded a Progress Medal
Fontainebleau, November 8, 2025
Distinguished Members of the Audience,
It is an honor for me to say a few words about the work of Jürgen Habermas on this august occasion.
Jürgen Habermas has always been there.
I obviously do not quite mean that literally, but it is true autobiographically, both for myself and for the Federal Republic of Germany.
When I was in the last years of high school, in Germany, we encountered Habermas in civics class—by that time, and we are talking about the late 1980s, his work had long been important enough for the broader intellectual outlook in Germany that we read it in school. Little did I know back then that at a distant time in the future, I would fly in from the United States to talk about Habermas to a global audience—in France.
It was not an easy encounter—mine with Habermas’s work, that is. German is a compact language, with a far more limited vocabulary than English. So, as a precocious teenager, I thought I had figured out the whole depth of my mother’s language. But then we encountered Goethe’s Faust. And I realized that I really hadn’t. And then later—came Habermas, and I learned this lesson again.
My 17-year-old self learned the lesson that the life of the mind at times could be hard.
That also means I learned from the beginning that Habermas is an author one needs to approach with patience.
But his work does repay the patience.
Habermas was born in 1929 — which means he was too young to be pressured into the strictures of National Socialism, and just old enough to play a major role in the rebuilding of public intellectual culture in post-war Germany, in the Federal Republic of Germany. And so he did, and in that sense, as far as the Federal Republic is concerned, he has always been there, making sure German politics was not conducted without its intellectuals—was not conducted without intellectuals who had drawn lessons from the past.
When Habermas was in his 20s, one of the great intellectual figures from Germany’s Nazi past—the greatest such figure—was Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s unrepentant attitude towards National Socialism should always remind us of how philosophy can serve social pathologies—and the current situation in the world should remind us that it will always require courage to make sure that philosophy resists social pathologies.
Habermas’s first major public appearance was in 1953, when he was 24, when he demanded an explanation from Heidegger for his Nazi sympathies in a lengthy newspaper article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Subsequently Habermas would articulate his own understanding of how philosophy should interact with political practice. He gradually became a major figure in an established philosophical outfit, the Frankfurt School. He replaced the early Frankfurt School goal of grasping capitalism’s inner workings with a project of formulating and promoting ideals of emancipation organized around the idea of a domination-free discourse about politics.
His famous “theory of communicative action” develops the idea that political order depends on the ability of the participants—and thus of those who are subject to this order—to recognize the intersubjective validity of claims sustaining cooperation—that is, claims concerning the regulation of society.
Unlike for many great figures of our philosophical past, for Habermas, justice is not a matter of approximating ideal templates, but of people standing in a certain relationship to each other. Justice is not about philosophical stances being available and the philosopher applying them, or about politicians applying philosophical precepts. It is about people giving each other justifications. Habermas makes citizens as participants central to both political theory and political practice.
On his certificate that accompanies the medal he receives today, we say the Society for Progress is awarding him a progress medal for: codifying morality as a communicative process in which consultation, deliberation, and exchange are fundamental acts that enable and legitimate collective choice and action.
And that does capture it well.
Central to his understanding of politics as part of his theory of communicative action
is the term “discourse”—and should you ever interact with current devotees of the Frankfurt School, just mentioning the word “discourse” will make you friends quickly.
“Discourses” are processes of argumentation that test claims for rational justifiability. The idealized conception of practical discourse is summarized in the “discourse principle” (D): a rule of action or choice is justified, and thus valid, only if all those affected by the rule or choice could accept it in a reasonable discourse. The basic rule is the “principle of universalizability” (U): for norms to be valid, results and side-effects (from general acceptance) for each person’s interest must be acceptable to all without force.
Applied to law, D means: Laws are legitimate only if they could be the outcome of a fair public deliberation among free and equal citizens. And that is where human rights enter. Human rights specify the baseline conditions for such a discourse, such as rights to life and bodily integrity, freedoms of opinion, association, and religion; equal political rights; procedural guarantees, etc.
So for Habermas, human rights are legally institutionalized conditions under which those subject to state coercion can see themselves as both addressees and authors of the law. They give legal shape to a universal moral demand of equal respect, but they only fully “exist” as part of a democratic constitutional order in which private and public autonomy are, as Habermas, likes to say, co‑original. Nationally, they are woven into constitutions; globally, they require developing post-national legal institutions that partially reproduce the same discursive, co‑authoring logic across borders.
Rather than offering substantive theory, Habermas’s discourse theory of morality (“discourse ethics”) describes procedurally just communication, that is, inclusive critical discussion free of social and economic pressures where participants treat each other as equals in their efforts to obtain an understanding on matters that concern all. The procedures ensure that the results are just—and there is nothing more to them being just.
Some questions for individuals living together concern basic value orientations that reflect views of the good life. Such questions do not require answers that are equally acceptable to all. Accordingly, neither procedurally just communication nor universalizability are needed to sort out such questions. Other questions concern fundamental living arrangements and must be answered in terms of binding norms equally acceptable to all. This latter sort of question constitutes the moral standpoint—for Habermas the same as the standpoint of justice.
“The universalizability principle functions like a knife that puts a cut between the good and the just,” Habermas once wrote. Justice is about conflicts people must address without argumentative support from views of the good life—a view also developed by my Harvard predecessor John Rawls.
Discourse ethics is reflexive—and reflexivity is another essential term in this context, one that will also make you friends in Frankfurt. (Not where the bankers live, but where the intellectuals live.)
From the Latin reflectere, “bend back,” the term is used in grammar where, for instance, we talk about reflexive pronouns. Such pronouns refer back to an entity the sentence has already introduced, as in, “She blames herself.” For discourse ethics to be reflexive means it does not present positive theories of goodness or rightful behavior, as many other philosophies do, but identifies presuppositions and requirements of successful communication by considering typical cases of communication. Much as reflexive pronouns bend back to the subject—rather than to an entity not previously mentioned in the sentence— discourse ethics bends back to communicating agents—rather than to theories.
For Habermas, in reason-giving discourses there are only participants. Philosophers and other intellectuals should help improve practices of reason. The discourse framework must of course be developed in the first place: structures or presuppositions inherent in practices must be revealed. Moreover, intellectuals should improve democratic practices that implement the ideal. Actual discourses often do not involve all affected parties. The best we can achieve then is partial justification, in the sense that perhaps no argument ultimately convinces everybody—but not all arguments are defeated.
However, by virtue of the endeavor’s reflexivity, philosophers advise only on procedures. Philosophy cannot relieve people of the necessity to answer substantive questions about justice or a meaningful life. Unlike for instance Rawls, Habermas, as should be clear by now, does not offer principles of distributive justice. Justice is not about people holding shares but about involvement in opinion formation. Habermas does derive basic laws from the notion of legitimate law, including rights to equal opportunities for participation in public opinion formation, or to social, technological and ecological conditions needed for participation. But the details are left to deliberation.
Advice on procedures, however, can still be given. And for this purpose philosophical expertise is needed. What characterizes our age, and generates a very specific place for philosophers, according to Habermas, is that we no longer think we are in a position to make unqualified statements about the whole of nature and history, about the totality of being—at least not without referring to our reflexively analyzed means of representation. On the other hand, we associate a discursively redeemable validity claim with all philosophical propositions that remain within this framework.
For Habermas moral claims must be defended publicly. Validity of moral claims—which merits acceptance by addressees—involves a notion of correctness analogous to truth. Philosophical knowledge is restricted to meta-ethical knowledge about the appropriateness of certain ways of establishing moral claims. Substantive matters must be decided in real discourses. Philosophers can participate as affected parties, possibly as experts, and over time discourse might approximate the ideal. But philosophers cannot execute discourses on their own.
But to come back from that digression: As an affected party, Habermas has indeed always participated. It is hard to think of any figure in the history of philosophy whose work and sheer presence was as strongly connected to the story of a polity as Habermas is to the Federal Republic of Germany. Between 1953 and the current time, no major debate in Germany has been complete without Habermas’s voice. John Dewey in the United States and Jean-Paul Sartre in France played similar roles for certain times—but there’s no counterpart in their cases to what I referred to earlier as the fact that Habermas has always been there.
It was for this reason that I already encountered him in high school—and it is now—in the fall of 2025—profoundly meaningful for me to tell you about his work while he remains an active scholar and citizen.
Jürgen Habermas has succeeded both as a philosopher and as a citizen, and has provided inspiration for the rest of us in both roles. In these times that are so precarious for democracy everywhere, we often say, and rightly so, that the remedy is more and better democracy. More and better democracy—an aspiration whose realization all of you, all of us, must contribute to if it is to go anywhere. There is hardly a philosopher who would back up this message more strongly than Habermas. And there’s hardly a citizen who would exemplify it better than Habermas.
He will not, in fact, always be there. And then the rest of us must carry on. If you look around in the world, you must understand that carrying on in his spirit has literally never been more important than it is now.
Congratulations to Jürgen Habermas on being awarded the Progress Medal! May we continue the work he has begun…
Mathias Risse | Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights
