Article by Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri: “Jürgen Habermas’ enduring work began in the coffee-houses of Georgian London. His deepest insight was, in the end, a conservative one.
Georgian London had around 3,000 coffee houses. For a penny a cup, a merchant, a shopkeeper or a gentleman could sit down together, read the newspapers spread before them, and argue about the affairs of Parliament, the conduct of the war against France, or the merits of the latest edition of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator. The most powerful account of this world, and of its destruction, was perhaps unexpectedly written not by an English historian but by a German philosopher born into a provincial middle-class household in North Rhine-Westphalia, who died on Saturday in the Bavarian town of Starnberg at the age of 96.
Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929 into the kind of provincial, educated German household that had neither resisted nor much assisted Hitler’s regime. At 15 he was sent to the Western Front in the last chaotic months of the war. What followed shaped his cultural and political outlook: the Nuremberg revelations, the slow reckoning with what had been done in Germany’s name against the Jews, and a conviction, arrived at young and never abandoned, that the liberal constitutional state as it had developed in the English-speaking world represented a genuine civilisational achievement. Years later he described himself, with characteristic precision, as a ‘product of re-education’…(More)”.
