Systematic Assessment from a Hegelian Perspective
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
What Remains of Habermas?
The genuine merits cannot be denied:
First: the rehabilitation of reason. Against the irrationalism of postmodernism, Habermas has shown that critique is possible - but only if we hold fast to reason. Communicative reason is not domination but the enabling of critique.
Second: the connection of philosophy and social science. Habermas has shown that philosophical questions (What is rationality?) cannot be answered without empirical research (How does communication function?).
Third: political relevance. Habermas’s interventions - from the Historians’ Dispute to the debate on Europe - show an intellectual who takes on responsibility. That is rare and valuable.
What Would Hegel Have Objected?
From a Hegelian perspective, fundamental objections remain:
First: eclecticism. Habermas combines various traditions (Weber, Mead, speech act theory, systems theory) without integrating them systematically. The result is rich but unsystematic. Hegel would have asked: how do these elements relate to one another conceptually? How do they follow from one another?
Second: the abstract separation of system and lifeworld. Hegel would have criticized this dichotomy as understanding-thought (Verstandesdenken) - as a fixed opposition that fails to achieve mediation. The dialectical alternative: system and lifeworld are moments of a single process, not two spheres.
Third: the Kantian regression. The path from Hegel to Kant is, philosophically, a step backward. Hegel had shown why Kant’s transcendental philosophy is inadequate - it remains stuck at the abstract ought, without achieving mediation with being. Habermas repeats this error: domination-free communication remains a regulative idea, without institutional mediation.
Fourth: the missing self-application. Hegel’s logic is self-referential - it applies its method to itself. Habermas’s theory is not. He describes communicative reason, but he does not derive his own categories from it. This is a lack of reflexive consistency.
The Comparison with Heinrichs
The comparison with Heinrichs makes clear what Habermas lacks:
Heinrichs offers the grounding through the logic of reflection that is absent in Habermas. The four elements of meaning and levels of reflection are not arbitrarily posited but systematically derived. The fourfold structure of society follows from the structure of social reflection itself.
Heinrichs resolves the system/lifeworld dichotomy through the logic of reflection. System and action are equiprimordial - two aspects of the same reflexive process. The fourth level of reflection (the institutional level) is not “system” as opposed to “lifeworld,” but the highest level of social reflection.
Heinrichs develops concrete institutional consequences. The fourfold structure of democracy is not idealism but a practical proposal. Communication low in domination is not merely a regulative idea but can be institutionally enabled - through systematic differentiation of societal levels.
The non-reception of Heinrichs by Habermas is therefore more than a biographical footnote. It reveals a systematic refusal: Habermas could have found in Heinrichs an interlocutor who answered his questions more systematically. That he did not seize this opportunity is one of the missed chances of postwar German philosophy.
Outlook: The Unintended Consequences (-> Volume III)
1989 - at the end of the period we are considering - finds Habermas at the height of his influence. The Historians’ Dispute has been won, communicative reason seems to have triumphed, the old Federal Republic has found its philosophical form.
But the irony of history is bitter: it is precisely Habermas’s most important student, Axel Honneth, who in “Struggle for Recognition” (1992) returns to Hegel - thereby implicitly conceding that Habermas’s path from Hegel to Kant was a detour. The theory of recognition that Honneth develops is more Hegelian than anything Habermas ever wrote.
And still more bitter: the “post-heroic” political culture for which Habermas fought his whole life would erode in the 2020s. The theorist of domination-free communication would witness his life’s work “dissolve between his hands” - as he himself put it in a late interview. The history of the reception of Habermas after 1989 - including this late disillusionment - belongs to Volume III.