There are thinkers whose presence stays like a long conversation across generations. Even when public life grows distressing and impatient, their work remains a place to return to for clarity, argument, and self-reflection. Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026) remained part of that rare category of intellectuals. For decades, his writings influenced debates on reason, rationality, democracy, public sphere, law, communication, and the moral responsibilities of modern societies. With his demise, an important era in twentieth-and twenty-first-century critical thought has come to an end, and his works will continue to provoke, inspire, and divide readers across the world.Habermas was born and grew up during one of the darkest periods in German and European history. His early life saw the rise and collapse of Nazism. Like many young Germans of his generation, he briefly passed through institutions moulded by that regime. But the moral and political ruin revealed in 1945 influenced him. It pushed him toward philosophy, public reasoning, and critical inquiry. In postwar Germany, he joined the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and became one of the most important second-generation thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Under the influence of Theodor W. Adorno and others, he inherited the tradition of critical theory, but he also changed it in his own way. He was often described as a neo-Marxist, but his intellectual path was broader than doctrinal Marxism. He tried to renew Enlightenment reason rather than abandon it.To understand Habermas, one must also understand the Frankfurt School. Founded in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research, it brought together influential thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. Their aim was not simply to repeat orthodox Marxism, but to rethink social theory in the context of modern capitalism, fascism, authoritarianism, and cultural domination. They developed what came to be known as critical theory – an interdisciplinary approach drawing on Marx, Hegel, Freud, sociology, and philosophy to analyse ideology, power, and the role of mass culture in shaping modern society.The rise of Nazism forced many of these scholars into exile, with the Institute relocating first to Geneva and later to New York before returning to Germany after the war. These experiences strengthened their critique of authoritarianism and blind faith in progress. Habermas entered this intellectual tradition after the war but moved in a different direction. While earlier thinkers often emphasised the failures of modern reason, Habermas tried to recover its emancipatory potential, arguing that free and rational communication could provide a foundation for democratic life and social legitimacy.His major works established him as one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Habermas examined how a bourgeois public sphere had emerged in early modern Europe through salons, coffee houses, reading societies, and discussion forums. These were spaces where private persons came together to debate matters of common concern. He argued that such spaces helped create a zone between state power and private life, allowing citizens to criticise authority and shape public opinion. This public sphere was important because it linked civil society and political life through discussion.Habermas did not romanticise the public sphere without qualification. He also traced its decline. As capitalism developed into monopoly and welfare capitalism, and as corporations, media systems, and state bureaucracies expanded, the character of the public sphere changed. Public debate increasingly came to be shaped by powerful institutions, commercial interests, and mass communication. Citizens, he argued, risked becoming passive consumers rather than active participants in democratic life. In this process, the boundary between public and private blurred, and the space for critical public reasoning weakened.The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere had a wide impact on sociology, political theory, media studies, and cultural studies. At the same time, it also attracted strong criticism. Scholars such as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge pointed out that the bourgeois public sphere described by Habermas excluded many groups, including workers, women, and other marginalised communities. Others questioned whether democratic politics had ever functioned in the rational and inclusive way that Habermas suggested. Habermas took these criticisms seriously and responded to them in later writings, revising and expanding his ideas.In his later work, Habermas moved toward a broader theory of democracy, law, and communication. In The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), he argued that human beings are not only strategic actors pursuing interests but also communicative beings capable of reaching understanding through dialogue. This idea became central to his discourse ethics and democratic theory. For Habermas, the legitimacy of modern societies must depend on the possibility that citizens can participate in rational discussions about the norms and laws that govern them. In this sense, communication becomes central to freedom and democratic life.Habermas also reworked the legacy of the Enlightenment, particularly the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He admired Kant’s emphasis on freedom, equality, and moral autonomy, but he believed that autonomy could not exist merely as a formal principle. For Habermas, autonomy required real social and material conditions that allow individuals to exercise their freedom. Legal rights alone were insufficient. Citizens also needed economic security, opportunities for participation, and institutions that supported democratic engagement. This is why he saw the welfare state and democratic participation as closely connected. At the same time, he warned that the expansion of state power could weaken civil liberties and intrude into everyday life. The solution, he argued, was not to dismantle institutions but to democratise them through a vibrant public sphere.These concerns shaped Habermas’s later work Between Facts and Norms, where he developed a theory of deliberative democracy suited to modern societies. He examined how constitutional democracy, law, courts, public opinion, and civil society could interact in a legitimate political order. Rejecting revolutionary ideas of seizing state power, he emphasised the role of communication and public discussion in shaping democratic decisions. Habermas believed that modern societies could remain legitimate only if citizens had real opportunities to participate in public reasoning. In his view, the public sphere functions as a kind of warning system that brings social problems into public debate and pressures political institutions to respond.At the same time, his approach remained reformist. Although he criticised the inequalities and failures of capitalism, he did not see capitalism as something that could easily be overcome. Instead, he aimed to deepen democracy within constitutional systems. Critics, especially from Marxist traditions, argued that this perspective underestimated how deeply capitalist power shapes media, communication, and public life. These questions became sharper in the age of neoliberal globalisation. Habermas hoped that new democratic possibilities could emerge, including an international public sphere and a more universal legal order. He supported ideas of post-national democracy and European integration, and for a time he was a strong advocate of European political unification.However, global developments moved in a different direction. Instead of a more just international order, the world witnessed wars, interventions, growing inequality, and the selective use of international law. Events such as the invasion of Iraq, the continuing violence in Gaza, and other geopolitical crises revealed the limits of the universalist hopes that shaped some of Habermas’s later reflections.His political judgments were therefore not free from controversy. In Germany, he played an important public role in postwar debates, including the Historikerstreit, where he strongly opposed efforts to relativize Nazi crimes. He supported student energies in the 1960s but warned against authoritarian tendencies within radical movements. He intervened in debates on European federalism, Kosovo, bioethics, migration, and constitutionalism. Yet his interventions on international questions sometimes drew sharp criticism. More recently, his 2023 statement defending Israel’s right to exist amid Hamas attacks on October 7 sparked debate, with critics alleging inconsistency given US-backed occupation policies, highlighting tensions in his universalist ethics amid geopolitical realitiesEarlier, however, Habermas had reflected critically on US policy in the Middle East, particularly regarding the Iraq War and Western interventions, analysing them through his theories of communicative action, legitimacy, and public reason. In his 2003 open “Letter to America,” he warned against unilateral US military action in Iraq without UN Security Council consensus, arguing it eroded global legitimacy and risked destabilising the region’s volatile dynamics absent a viable reconstruction plan.Habermas insisted that modernity, despite its failures, still contains emancipatory possibilities. At the same time, his work also bears the contradictions of liberal reformism. His public sphere could appear too idealised, too dependent on institutional procedures, and too optimistic about the possibility of rational consensus under conditions shaped by inequality and power.Habermas remains one of the most significant thinkers of the modern age. His writings cannot be reduced either to praise or dismissal. They belong to a tradition of serious argument about how people might live together under conditions of freedom, law, and mutual recognition. That tradition has now lost one of its last great representatives.K.M. Seethi is director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension and academic advisor to the International Centre for Polar Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) in Kerala. He also served as ICSSR senior fellow, senior professor of international relations and dean of social sciences at MGU.