The madness and speed of Germany’s descent in the 1930s had spawned an industry of remembrance and self-flagellation among leftist thinkers at the time. Habermas, however, while responsible in large part for our confrontation and reckoning with humanity’s nearly existential failure during the war, remained skeptical of the worst and most pernicious elements of the left, which in its modern form has become wholly untethered from outcomes and indeed unconcerned with the practical effects of its ideology. He remained allergic to un-rigorous thought, no matter its political allegiance.
The theater of the discourse, for many, became more important than what was happening in the world, which is that the profound successes of the progressive left in the middle part of the 20th century in advancing the interests of an American underclass had descended into a sort of imperial overreach — an obsession with theory at the complete expense of practice and results.
Habermas advocated for what he described as _Verfassungspatriotismus_, or constitutional patriotism — the view that one could be loyal to a republic while setting aside the more parochial and tribal affiliations that had dominated human history since the advent of the species. A permanent end to a distasteful and unenlightened nationalism in all of its forms, we were assured, was near.
The vision was noble yet, in hindsight it seems clear, strikingly premature and misguided. In 2011, the German magazine _Der Spiegel_ described him as “the last European,” as the continental government for which he had advocated so fiercely came under increasingly sustained assault.
His hope for a sort of disembodied political identity, untethered from the inconvenient particularities of family and culture, represented an aspirational cosmopolitanism that has proven insufficient to animate allegiance in the modern era. Put differently, he believed in the possibility of a purely rational public discourse. I believed, and still believe, such a discourse must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional — and indeed national and cultural — source.
In the years after our first meeting in Frankfurt, I continued work on my dissertation, which concerned an obscure critique of Parsons, focused on the human mind’s instinct towards aggression and its implications for our deployment of jargon as a means of exercising power over others.
There were diversions, certainly, both professional and romantic.
I developed a side business of sorts, asking German colleagues who made trips to Zurich to bring me back Cuban cigars; the prices and taxes were more forgiving across the Swiss border. I kept half of the cigars for myself and sold the rest to bankers in Frankfurt.
After a number of years, I eventually developed a firmer vision of the shape of the critique that would become my dissertation and drafted 40 pages or so, in German, that I thought worthy of submission to Habermas for his review.
On August 10, 2000, I received a three-page typed letter from him, forwarded by Karola Brede via fax, critiquing various aspects of the draft in detail but also declining to continue on as my adviser. He disagreed with my approach to the literature.
It was a lengthy and methodical dissection of my work. He wrote, for example, that “you must more clearly articulate how your conception differs from the Parsonian model of biologically rooted drives that have been culturally shaped — drives which, for the sociologist, become relevant only at the level of interpreted needs.”
But he had a broader critique as well.
“You simply cannot compete with literary critics and theorists \[who have recently weighed in on this subject\],” he wrote.
His rejection, in the end, was unequivocal. I had spent several years in his colloquium at the Institute for Social Research and even longer refining my understanding of the language. His decision came as an utter shock and was wounding. The sting would linger for years.
And yet it was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.
Karola Brede, a sociology professor at the Sigmund Freud Institute with whom Habermas worked closely, kindly stepped in to supervise my dissertation. And nearly two years later, on November 14, 2002, with Brede’s wise counsel and support, I received my doctorate.