The funeral cortège for Jürgen Habermas was carried out, appropriately enough, in what still passes for the German public sphere – the national newspapers where he first made his name, more than 70 years ago. One article after another in the long convoy declared it was the end of an era, that it was incumbent upon every rational person to take up the banner of the ‘unfinished project’ of modernity, and that the faithful carry on the ‘learning process’ of humanity. ‘He was a tireless source of far-reaching political norms’, Charles Taylor declared. ‘His thinking was political right down to the most abstract questions’, Rahel Jaeggi wrote. Habermas’s prose, Gustav Seibt assured readers in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, could be ‘brilliant, even snappy’. Eva Illouz thanked Habermas for protecting Europe against Foucault. The Chancellor of the Federal Republic, Friedrich Merz, affirmed that Habermas ‘was one of the most important thinkers of our time’, and that ‘his analytical rigor shaped democratic discourse in Germany’. Perhaps the only dissonant note was sounded in Die Zeit by the Chinese philosopher Tsuo-Yu Cheng, who noted that Habermas had been the rage in China in the 1980s, but was no longer really read there. This stately procession was in marked contrast to the bruitings of the Anglo left, for whom Habermas seemed to figure as a presence hazily remembered from college syllabuses, and anyway wasn’t he in the Hitler Youth and wrong about Gaza?
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