Institutional Power and the Non-Reception of Heinrichs
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Silence
Habermas’s influence rested not only on the quality of his arguments but also on his institutional position. The Suhrkamp publishing house, the Frankfurt School, the international network - all of this gave him the power to define what counted as relevant philosophy.
In this context, the non-reception of Johannes Heinrichs is symptomatic. Heinrichs taught in the same city (Frankfurt), published five years before Habermas’s major work, treated exactly the same questions - and was never mentioned, never cited, never recognized as an interlocutor. Heinrichs’s open letter to Habermas (2007) went unanswered.
This non-reception is documentable through the complete absence of references in Habermas’s work. It cannot be explained by lack of relevance - “Reflection as Social System” addressed precisely the questions that occupied Habermas, and offered more systematic solutions.
The Performative Self-Contradiction
The irony is bitter: the theorist of domination-free communication himself exercised considerable institutional power - and did not always use it in the spirit of his own theory. To ignore power is the subtlest form of power. It needs no arguments - it simply denies recognition as an interlocutor.
Habermas’s central idea is domination-free communication - the unforced force of the better argument, the principled openness to all rational interlocutors. And then the theorist of this communication practices institutional selection over who even counts as an interlocutor.
Heinrichs’s logic of reflection explains what Habermas’s theory fails to grasp: the power of refusing communication, and the metacommunicative level of admission to discourse. Discourse ethics presupposes that potential interlocutors are already recognized as such. But who decides who is recognized? This metacommunicative question is not answered by Habermas theoretically, and is decided in practice by institutional power.[1]
The non-reception of Heinrichs by Habermas is documentable through the complete absence of references in Habermas’s work. Johannes Heinrichs’s open letter to Habermas (2007) went unanswered. ↩︎