"Portrait: Jürgen Habermas" by Jan-Werner Müller, in Prospect (Mar. 2001), 4 Bedford Sq., London WC 1B 3RD, U.K.

Like Joschka Fischer, the erstwhile rock-throwing activist who is now German foreign minister, the world-renowned German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has moved away from radicalism in recent years and helped the Left to reconcile itself to liberal democracy and the German state. Indeed, Habermas is the unofficial court philosopher to Fischer and the Social Democrat-Green government in Berlin, writes Müller, author of Another Country (2000).

Heir to the Frankfurt school and its Marxist-Freudian "critical theory" about society, Habermas was intent during the 1950s on ridding German academic life of persistent Nazi influence. He vigorously opposed Martin Heidegger and other right-wing thinkers whom he deemed dangerous to the then-young West German democracy. "Habermas found an ideological antidote," Müller says, "in a mixture of Marxism and an idealized version of British and U.S. democracy."

His first major work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), says Müller, "already contained his master idea—the connection between undistorted, domination-free communication and democracy." Student radicals of the 1960s took up his criticisms of the way in which free debate was distorted by private or sectional interests. "He was sympathetic to the student revolt," says Müller, "yet he also warned the rebels" against trying to achieve social change through violence.

In Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), Habermas argued that, contrary to Marx, communication was as vital as labor in the evolution of society. The book, which thus gave social scientists a significant "progressive" role to play, "caused great excitement on both sides of the Atlantic," Müller says. Habermas next "made critical theory absorb the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, and synthesized huge areas of contemporary thought." As he accomplished this, Müller notes, his writings became "even harder to understand"—which may have helped to make him a cult hero among academic Marxists in America.

In recent years, Habermas has seemed "to abandon any theoretical criticism of capitalism," Müller says, "instead focusing on the importance of law in modern societies and on the relationship between liberalism and democracy."

Patriotism, with its inevitable reminder of the Nazi era, has long posed a problem for Germans.

Here, too, Habermas has found a middle way. During the 1980s, he strongly opposed "what he saw as an attempt to ‘sanitize’ German identity and relativize the Holocaust," Müller says. Yet unlike, for instance, left-wing novelist Günter Grass, Habermas accepted German unification in 1990. Instead of ethnic nationalism, he advocates Verfassungspatriotismus, or constitutional patriotism, which, Müller explains, would be "a new form of ‘postnational’ political belonging, not just for Germany but for Europe as a whole." Citizens would "transcend their particular national traditions," and the German state (like others) would "melt into a European federation of some kind."