The Hegel Question: Necessity or Opportunism?
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Path from Hegel to Kant
One of the most striking movements in Habermas’s development is the path from Hegel to Kant. The early Habermas - in “Knowledge and Human Interests” (-> Chapter 7.4) - still stands clearly within the Hegelian tradition. He thinks dialectically, he thinks historically, he thinks from the standpoint of totality.
The late Habermas - in “The Theory of Communicative Action” and discourse ethics - has become Kantian. He thinks procedurally, he thinks transcendentally, he thinks from the conditions of possibility. Discourse ethics is explicitly conceived as a transformation of Kantian ethics.
This movement was not accidental. It corresponded to the intellectual climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Hegel was suspect - as a precursor of totalitarianism (Popper), as a metaphysician (analytic philosophy), as a systematizer (postmodernism). Kant, by contrast, was rehabilitated - as the thinker of autonomy, as the founder of critical philosophy, as a democrat.
The Question of Necessity
But was this movement substantively necessary? Or was it tactically motivated - a swing toward the dominant discourse?
The irony is that Habermas’s own students partly reversed the movement. Axel Honneth - Habermas’s most important student - returned to Hegel. His “Struggle for Recognition” (1992) is a rehabilitation of Hegel’s theory of recognition against Habermas’s Kantian discourse ethics. Honneth showed: communicative reason is grounded in relations of recognition that are not themselves discursive.
This raises the question: if Hegel was so problematic, why did Habermas’s students return to him? And if the return was justified, why had Habermas not made it himself?
As this book shows throughout: most critiques of Hegel rest on misunderstandings. Hegel was no totalitarian (Popper is wrong), no mere metaphysician (the analytic philosophers are wrong), no closed systematizer (the postmodernists are wrong). The critique of Hegel that Habermas joined was itself open to criticism.
The systematic question: what would have happened had Habermas remained with Hegel? Had he further developed the dialectical method instead of returning to Kantian transcendental philosophy? The answer might be: he would have produced a more systematic work - one that does not merely describe its categories but derives them; one that does not dichotomously separate system and lifeworld but mediates them through the logic of reflection; one that does not suppress the fourth level of reflection but unfolds it.[1]
On the question of whether Habermas’s path from Hegel to Kant was substantively necessary or intellectually opportune, see Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung. Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte, Frankfurt am Main 1992 - a work in which Habermas’s most important student carries out the return to Hegel. ↩︎