In 2006, while studying for a masters in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, I took a module with Prof. Ruth Sonderegger that involved a close reading of both volumes of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. She went on to supervise my thesis, which became a sustained critique of Habermas’s framework.
My argument was that Habermas had no adequate theory of power, and in particular, no theory of capitalism. He could defend democracy philosophically but could not explain how it is undermined materially. At the time, the theory of communicative action felt like it might offer a genuine foundation for democratic politics. The internet was still young, full of utopian promise. The European Union was enlarging eastward. Deliberative democracy was ascendant in political theory. Habermas seemed to have identified something fundamental about what makes democratic life possible: that buried within the structures of everyday language is a rational potential, a commitment to mutual understanding, that precedes and makes possible the democratic institutions we build to govern ourselves.
His death on 14 March 2026, at the age of 96, is an occasion to revisit those ideas. Not with nostalgia, but with the critical seriousness his own work demands. It was my critique of Habermas that led me down the path to political economy. Twenty years later, I am a professor of political economy, and the questions I first raised in that Amsterdam thesis have only become more urgent.
Communicative reason and the defence of modernity
Habermas’s intellectual project was, at root, a rescue operation. His teachers in the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, had argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment that reason itself had become an instrument of domination. The Enlightenment, far from liberating humanity, had produced the administered society, the culture industry, the concentration camp. Their conclusion was deeply pessimistic: modernity was a catastrophe, and reason offered no way out.
Habermas saw in this a performative contradiction. Adorno and Horkheimer were using reason to argue that reason was irredeemable, leaving no ground on which to stand. His entire subsequent career can be understood as an attempt to show that they were wrong, or at least only half right. Instrumental reason, the strategic, means-ends rationality that dominates the capitalist economy and the bureaucratic state, was indeed pathological when left unchecked. But there was another form of rationality, embedded in the very structure of human communication, that could not be reduced to domination. This was communicative reason.
The argument, developed across the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), was vast in ambition. Drawing on speech act theory, developmental psychology, sociological systems theory, and the pragmatist tradition, Habermas argued that every time we make a claim in conversation we implicitly raise validity claims: that what we say is true, normatively right, and sincerely meant. These claims can always be challenged and must, in principle, be redeemed through argument rather than coercion. This was not a theory about how people “should” communicate, but an ontological observation about what it means to communicate at all.
From this, Habermas derived a distinction that shaped a generation of social theory: between the “lifeworld” and the “system”. The lifeworld is the background of shared meanings, norms, and identities through which we coordinate action communicatively. The system, by contrast, coordinates action through the steering media of money in the capitalist economy and administrative power in the bureaucratic state. Both are necessary in complex modern societies. But the pathology of modernity, Habermas argued, lies in the “colonisation” of the lifeworld by the “system”: the encroachment of market logic and bureaucratic rationality into domains of life, such as the public sphere, science, education, arts and culture, family, and democratic will-formation, that depend on communicative reason for their integrity.
This was, and remains, a powerful framework. It offered a way to defend the Enlightenment project without being naive about it. It provided a post-metaphysical justification for democracy, one that did not rely on appeals to God, natural law, or any particular moral tradition, but on the rational presuppositions of communication itself. It was what drew me to his work as a young student. The postmodernists were tearing down every claim to universality, and failed to see that they were opening the door to the reactionary right. The authoritarian right was consolidating power through cultural reaction. Habermas seemed to offer a third way: defend modernity, but do so critically. His post-metaphysical thinking was, in essence, a philosophical argument for democracy itself.
My own position, developed during those Amsterdam years, was that to be modern is to be critical, and that being “radically modern” at whatever point in time in history, always requires being critical of those in positions of economic power. This, however, needs a democratic normative foundation, which neither the Marxists nor postmodernists could provide.
Where he went wrong: the absence of political economy
So even as a masters student, I found myself arguing against Habermas on what I considered a fundamental point. He had no adequate theory of power, and he had lost sight of political economy.
The problem was not that Habermas was unaware of capitalism. The colonisation thesis is precisely about the pathological expansion of market and state logics. But his analytical framework treated the economy and the state as functionally differentiated “systems” that operate through their own media, money and power, largely decoupled from the communicative rationality of the lifeworld. This was a sociological description borrowed from Niklas Luhmann, and it carried a heavy cost. It meant that Habermas could diagnose the symptoms of capitalist pathology without ever confronting the political economy that produced them.
In practice, this led to a theory of democracy that was strangely disembodied from the material conditions in which democracy actually operates. Habermas could theorise the ideal speech situation, the conditions under which rational consensus might be reached, without ever asking who owns the means of communication, who funds political parties, who shapes the legislative agenda, or how extreme concentrations of wealth distort democratic outcomes.
His public sphere was populated by rational citizens engaged in argument. It was not populated by corporate lobbyists, billionaire media owners, or the structural power of mobile capital. It was, in the end, a bourgeois public sphere, and the failure to theorise the material and structural inequalities that shape access to public discourse was not a minor oversight but a fundamental limitation of the theory. This lack of appreciation of how actually existing capitalism really works remains endemic across political science theories of democracy, and one of the main reasons I migrated away from political theory towards empirical political economy.
Habermas underestimated the degree to which democracy is embedded in capitalism, such that capitalist democracies are always at risk of capture by concentrations of wealth and corporate power. What my own research has shown, forensically, is that the legal and institutional architecture of capitalism is not a neutral backdrop to democratic politics. It is the terrain on which power is exercised.
Corporate groups use legal-technical instruments, the structuring of intellectual property, the layering of subsidiaries across jurisdictions, the design of intra-group financial flows, to concentrate profits and shield wealth from democratic oversight. This is not an aberration of the system. It is how the system works. And when profits and wealth concentrate to the degree we now observe, they do not merely distort democratic outcomes. They hollow out the material foundations on which liberal democracy depends. Capitalism, left to its own logic, undermines the very democracy it is supposed to coexist with.
Habermas’s framework lacked the resources to see any of this. He could not explain how law itself, the domain he came to celebrate in Between Facts and Norms as the medium through which communicative reason enters institutional life, is simultaneously the instrument through which corporate power entrenches itself. The same legal order that guarantees rights and enables democratic participation also enables the construction of opaque multi-jurisdictional structures designed to extract value, maximise profit, and protect wealth, while evading accountability. Habermas never confronted this tension. He never even saw it.
In this sense, his blind spot was curiously similar to that of the postmodernists he so effectively critiqued. The postmodernists dissolved power into discourse and lost the material. Habermas elevated communication to ontological primacy and lost the material too, albeit from the opposite direction. Both ended up with theories that could not explain why some people’s voices count more than others, and why democratic institutions so reliably serve the interests of capital.
David Hume’s old insight that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions was never adequately confronted. Habermas believed that the rational potential embedded in communication could, under the right institutional conditions, tame strategic action and the pursuit of power. The evidence of the last two decades suggests otherwise. The internet, which might have been the greatest expansion of the public sphere in human history, instead became an engine of polarisation, disinformation, and corporate surveillance. Social media platforms are not forums for rational deliberation. They are advertising businesses whose profit model depends on engagement, emotional outrage, and the algorithmic amplification of partisan conflict. This is the extreme opposite of anything Habermas envisaged.
This inattention to power was also visible in his thinking on the European Union, and painfully so in his final major public intervention. Habermas spent decades arguing for a constitutionalised European polity, a post-national democratic order grounded in constitutional patriotism rather than ethnic nationalism. It was an admirable vision. But it was a vision that had remarkably little to say about the political economy of European integration: the asymmetric power of creditor states, the deflationary bias of the eurozone, the reality of elite-driven technocracy, or the structural subordination of peripheral economies. His EU was a normative project. It was not a political economy.
His November 2023 co-authored statement on Israel and Gaza, issued as Israel’s assault on the besieged Strip intensified, was perhaps the most damaging illustration of this limitation. The statement expressed solidarity with Israel and argued its military response was “justified in principle”, while cautioning against accusations of genocide. It generated fierce criticism from scholars across the world, many of them deeply influenced by Habermas’s own work.
As Asef Bayat argued in an open letter, Habermas had contradicted his own principles: his Eurocentrism and the closure of debate about Palestine amounted to a betrayal of the very ideals of communicative reason, equal citizenship, and human dignity that defined his life’s work. Others went further, arguing that the statement’s one-sidedness was not a departure from Habermas’s universalism but an expression of its Eurocentric limits.
This is a harsh judgement, and it should be made carefully. But the point is not to condemn a 94-year-old man navigating the weight of German historical responsibility. It is to observe that power and historical taboo can suppress the very discourse Habermas championed. A theory of democracy that lacks an adequate account of power, material interest, and the colonial foundations of European modernity will, when tested, reproduce the very exclusions it claims to oppose.
Why communicative reason matters more than ever
And yet. For all its limitations, I keep coming back to Habermas. Not because he got everything right, but because he identified something that no other tradition in contemporary political thought has been able to replace.
We live in a moment of democratic crisis. Authoritarian and far-right populism is resurgent across the advanced capitalist democracies of the world. Public discourse has fractured into partisan information bubbles where shared facts are contested, conspiracy theories rampant, and reasoned argument is treated as a sign of weakness. Trust in democratic institutions is collapsing. The postmodernist left, for all its insights into power and difference, has absolutely no answer to this. If all truth claims are power moves, and if reason is merely a mask for domination, then there is no ground on which to defend democratic norms against those who would destroy them. The authoritarian right understands this perfectly. It does not argue. It asserts.
What Habermas grasped, and what we need now more than ever, is that democracy requires a normative foundation. Not an abstract idealism, and not an appeal to morality or religion, but a commitment to reason. The practice of democracy, whether liberal or social democratic, presupposes that disputes are settled through argument rather than force, and that claims to truth can be challenged and must be defended. If we abandon that commitment, what remains is not liberation but domination.
The task, then, is not to choose between Habermas and political economy but to do what Habermas himself failed to do: embed communicative reason in a theory of capitalist democracy. We need to understand that the conditions for rational public discourse are material conditions, shaped by who owns the platforms, who controls the data, who funds the think tanks, and who controls economic resources. The colonisation of the lifeworld is not an abstract sociological process. It is the concrete result of decades of deregulation, financialisation, and the political capture of democratic institutions by concentrated wealth. And it is enabled, at every step, by legal architectures that allow capital to move faster than democracy can respond.
The ideal of the public sphere, properly understood, is not a description of how things are. It is a critical standard against which existing institutions can be measured and found wanting. That is precisely its value. In a world of algorithmic polarisation, Trumpism, corporate capture, and authoritarian resurgence, the question Habermas spent his life asking: under what conditions can modern liberal societies govern themselves through reason rather than violence, is not outdated. It is the most urgent question in democratic politics.
Habermas gave us the normative framework. What he never adequately provided was the political economy to go with it. That remains the unfinished project.
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