"The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" (1985)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Defense of Modernity against Postmodernism
In 1985 “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity” appears - Habermas’s systematic engagement with postmodernism. He reconstructs the “discourse of modernity” from Hegel to Foucault and Derrida - and shows where it went off the rails.
The change in style is striking: while his technical philosophical texts - “The Theory of Communicative Action,” for instance - are marked by a nearly deliberately dry, austere diction, Habermas’s political-philosophical interventions are distinguished by rhetorical brilliance. He finds forceful images, coins labels that stick. One almost has the impression of dealing with two different authors: the systematizer and the polemicist.[1]
The thesis: the problem is not reason as such, but a particular model of reason - subject-centered reason. From Descartes to Hegel, reason was conceived as the self-relation of a subject that knows and shapes the world. This model is exhausted - here the postmodernists are right.
But the alternative is not the abandonment of reason but its transformation. Instead of subject-centered reason: communicative reason. Instead of the solitary subject that knows the world: subjects who communicate with one another and come to an understanding about the world.[1:1]
The Critique of Hegel: Completed Too Soon
Habermas’s critique of Hegel is revealing for his entire thought. Hegel had clearly seen the problem of modernity: division. Modernity shatters the traditional unities - man and God, individual and community, reason and nature. Hegel’s solution was dialectical reconciliation: spirit sublates the division by passing through it and overcoming it in a higher unity.
Habermas’s criticism: this solution is “too cheap.” Hegel reconciles too quickly, too completely, too definitively. “Absolute knowledge” claims a reconciliation that is factually not redeemed. The real conflicts - between classes, between individual and society, between reason and nature - are idealistically leapt over.
But Habermas does not reject Hegel entirely. He wants to preserve Hegel’s problem while transforming his solution. Modernity needs reconciliation - but not the definitive reconciliation of absolute spirit, but rather the ever-renewed mutual understanding of communicatively acting subjects.
This criticism touches a sore point - but it misses Hegel’s actual position. Hegel’s “absolute knowledge” is not a claim of factual reconciliation but insight into the structure of the process of reconciliation. Real conflicts are not “leapt over” but grasped as necessary moments. Habermas’s criticism hits the Hegel epigones, who turned dialectic into an ideology of justification, more than it hits Hegel himself.
The Critique of Foucault and Derrida
Foucault had shown that reason is bound up with power - every order of knowledge is also an order of power. Habermas accepts this in part: yes, instrumental reason is domination. But Foucault does not distinguish between different forms of rationality. He lumps everything together - including the critique that he himself practices.
Derrida had shown that meaning can never be finally fixed - every text refers to other texts, différance works infinitely. Habermas accepts this in part: yes, meaning is context-dependent, interpretation is never concluded. But Derrida exaggerates. In everyday communication we do in fact understand one another - not perfectly, but sufficiently. Mutual understanding is possible, even if it is never definitive.
The Historians’ Dispute (1986) and the “Hegel of the Federal Republic”
A year after “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,” Habermas triggers the Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit) with an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - the last great intellectual controversy of the old Federal Republic of West Germany. He attacks Ernst Nolte and other historians who sought to relativize Nazi crimes by comparing them with Soviet crimes.
The Historians’ Dispute shows Habermas at the height of his public influence. He defines what can be said and what cannot; he sets standards for how to deal with the German past. Die Zeit would later call him the “Hegel of the Federal Republic” - a title that is ironic, given Habermas’s increasing distancing from Hegel. But it hits on something: Habermas became the state philosopher of a republic that wanted no state philosopher - the systematizer of a post-heroic, civil-society order.[2]
Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen, Frankfurt am Main 1985. The book is Habermas’s most systematic engagement with postmodernism. The difference in style between the dry technical texts and the rhetorically brilliant political interventions is striking - as if one were dealing with two different authors. ↩︎ ↩︎
The Historians’ Dispute was triggered by Habermas’s article “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung” (“A Kind of Settlement of Damages”) in Die Zeit of July 11, 1986. The debate defined, for a generation, how Germany should deal with its past. The designation “Hegel of the Federal Republic” comes from a later tribute in Die Zeit. ↩︎