Habermas was, above all, a sociologist, even if much of the press insists on presenting him simply as a philosopher. That is not a minor distinction. His work was not only a contribution to philosophy in the narrow sense; it was also a formidable set of tools for thinking about society, legitimacy, consensus, institutions, and the formation of public opinion. For me, at least, his name immediately brings back my notes on The Theory of Communicative Action and, with them, those professors who still believed that the university existed not only to train people in supposedly practical skills, but also to teach them how to think. If I were eighteen or nineteen again, I would thank them precisely for that: for having taught me social theory without surrendering to the neoliberal common sense according to which the university is merely a factory of marketable competences. Habermas’s major work on communicative action and the public sphere sits exactly at that intersection of philosophy and social theory, which is why describing him only as a philosopher misses something essential.
Habermas is also, for me, those now almost mythical lecture notes on communicative action that circulated in sociological theory classes during my undergraduate years. But he is not only that. He is also the reading that filled many of my mornings years later, during my stay at the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig. At the time, I used my blog almost as an archive of readings, fragments, and working ideas that seemed worth preserving. Looking back, one of those UFZ posts now feels like a concise summary of what I took to be the central intuition in Habermas: that a vibrant public sphere could break the monopoly of rationality exercised by elites. That was the hope embedded in the theory, and part of what made it so powerful to me at the time. Yet that same rereading, in retrospect, also helps mark the distance between the world in which Habermas formulated that hope and the one we inhabit now. My UFZ blog posts were explicitly conceived as reflections on the reading material I was consulting on environmental sociology, post-mining, and restoration during that research stay, intertwined with the academic and personal experience of Leipzig.
That sociological dimension matters because Habermas was an important influence on generations of scholars trying to understand not just domination in the crude sense, but the far subtler processes through which domination becomes legitimacy, and legitimacy turns into common sense. One of the clearest examples is Shannon Elizabeth Bell and Richard York’s article “Community Economic Identity: The Coal Industry and Ideology Construction in West Virginia.” Their argument, which became important to my own thesis, shows how the coal industry in West Virginia managed to produce a genuine “community economic identity” around itself even as its actual role in employment had been declining for decades. The industry’s power did not lie only in jobs or direct economic dependency. Through a front group such as Friends of Coal, it succeeded in presenting coal as the natural center of community life, memory, loyalty, and belonging. Bell and York’s point was not simply that people were duped by propaganda. It was that an industry can continue to command affective allegiance even when it no longer materially sustains the people who defend it. That is a deeply Habermasian insight, in the sense that it helps us understand how public discourse, ideology, and mediated communication can preserve legitimacy long after the material basis of that legitimacy has eroded. See Shannon Elizabeth Bell and Richard York, “Community Economic Identity: The Coal Industry and Ideology Construction in West Virginia”.
And yet, what interested me in my own work was precisely the limit of that explanation. In my article, “Coal [from Colombia] is our life”: Bourdieu, the miners (after they are miners) and resistance in As Pontes, I tried to argue that these economic identities cannot be explained only as the effect of media manipulation or ideological distortion in the public sphere. They are not merely false ideas injected into passive populations. They also persist because they become embodied dispositions, historically sedimented attachments, social trajectories, habits of feeling, forms of recognition, and ways of making sense of oneself and one’s place in the world. In that respect, my argument was closer to Foucault, even if I worked through Bourdieu: power does not operate only by misleading consciousness; it also shapes subjects, affections, identities, and the very conditions under which people recognize themselves as who they are. The article’s abstract makes exactly that move, stressing symbolic violence, the internalization of categories and identities, and the persistence of extractive identities beyond the industries themselves.
This is where Habermas becomes, for me, both indispensable and insufficient. Indispensable, because he still offers perhaps the most ambitious normative defense of a democratic society organized around public reasoning rather than mere force, money, or administrative power. His wager was that a vibrant public sphere — civil associations, independent journalism, unions, universities, social movements, and all the intermediate institutions capable of sustaining informed public discussion — could break the monopoly of rationality exercised by elites. In that vision, emancipation remains tied to the possibility that arguments, under the right conditions, can prevail over manipulation, that communication can expose domination rather than simply reproduce it, and that institutions can secure spaces in which citizens meet one another as interlocutors rather than as targets of management. That aspiration still matters. It may even matter more than ever. Habermas’s whole career was built around defending democratic rationality and the possibility of public debate against authoritarianism, technocracy, and cynicism.
But this is also where the present begins to press against Habermas’s assumptions. For if Bell and York could still analyze a relatively classical form of ideological construction — an extractive industry using media, symbols, and front organizations to maintain social legitimacy — our own historical moment seems to pose a problem of another order. We no longer inhabit a public sphere in which distortions are occasional pathologies affecting an otherwise intelligible communicative space. We inhabit, increasingly, a regime of visibility organized by private platforms, opaque infrastructures, and algorithms that decide in advance what is seen, what circulates, what appears credible, and what can even emerge as politically legible. In such a world, it begins to sound almost naive to imagine that the problem can be solved simply with more public debate, when debate itself is already preformatted by systems designed to maximize attention, outrage, speed, emotional intensity, and commercial value rather than truth or fairness. The current concentration of power in large technology platforms has made this far more than an abstract philosophical worry. This last point is my inference from the platform-dominated conditions of contemporary public communication, rather than a claim taken from a single source, but Habermas’s later return to the problem of the public sphere remains directly relevant.
If I return to those UFZ mornings from the perspective of the present, that old Habermasian intuition acquires a different, more fragile light. Then, it still seemed plausible to think that stronger mediations, better institutional design, and a more vibrant public sphere might help correct distortions and allow a more truthful account of social reality to emerge. Now, under platform capitalism, it is far harder to sustain that confidence in such straightforward terms. The question that has stayed with me ever since is whether Habermas’s model can survive a world in which publicness itself has been technically reformatted. A public sphere that is already shaped in advance by algorithmic selection, commercial optimization, and privately owned infrastructures is not simply a damaged version of the old bourgeois public sphere; it may be something qualitatively different. That suspicion is not something I derived from a single book or article. It emerged gradually, in part through rereading Habermas against my own fieldwork and, later, against the transformations of the contemporary media environment.
This is why, uncomfortable as it may sound, I increasingly think that history has given Foucault at least part of the point. Habermas criticized him for a kind of sterile radicalism, for an excessive suspicion toward reason, normativity, and institutions, a suspicion that, in Habermas’s view, left too little room for any shared emancipatory project. But what if that suspicion was not a dead end so much as an early diagnosis? What if Foucault understood better than Habermas that there is no public truth and no free communication untouched by relations of power? What if the production of the visible, the sayable, and the believable is always already bound up with institutions, technologies, and disciplinary or strategic apparatuses? In a world dominated by social media, platform capitalism, and algorithmic governance, it no longer seems unreasonable that much of the left found Foucault more immediately useful than Habermas. Habermas gave us the norm; Foucault gave us the terrain. Habermas described what a decent democracy ought to become; Foucault described with greater lucidity the impure field in which such a democracy would actually have to struggle to exist. The contrast here is interpretive, but it is grounded in the same tension between communicative reason and power-laden formations that structured Habermas’s work and the Bell-York and As Pontes cases.
Seen from this angle, the distance between my reading of West Virginia and my argument about As Pontes becomes clearer. A Habermasian perspective helps explain how legitimacy is discursively produced. A Foucauldian-Bourdieusian perspective helps explain why that legitimacy can persist even when the discursive mystification has been exposed. The problem is not simply that people have been ideologically misled; it is that identities are made durable through history, embodiment, memory, and social space. That is why emancipation cannot be reduced to the ideal of a better argument finally winning the day. Even when a truth becomes available — that an industry no longer creates jobs, that it devastates communities environmentally and socially, that its discourse is manipulative — such truth does not automatically dissolve attachments. People do not live by facts alone. They live through inherited worlds, social honor, wounded dignity, accumulated losses, and histories that have settled into the body. In that sense, the path out of domination is much more demanding than Habermas sometimes allows.
To put it bluntly: the Habermasian idea of emancipation as the result of a vibrant public sphere seems, today, insufficient. Not false, exactly, but insufficient. The public sphere is no longer the relatively autonomous arena it was often imagined to be. It is a technical, political, and economic battlefield whose architecture is controlled by actors with extraordinary power over circulation, recognition, amplification, and silence. If the old problem was media manipulation by lobbies, the new problem is that the very structure of publicness has been privatized, automated, and optimized for extraction. The issue is no longer simply whether citizens can deliberate well; it is whether the conditions of possibility for deliberation survive at all under platform domination. Again, this is an interpretive extension of Habermas to present conditions, but it follows from the role that public communication and legitimacy play in his work and from the mediated, ideology-producing dynamics Bell and York describe.
At this point one obvious response is to say: then we need stronger institutions. More regulation. Better public media. More democratic oversight of technology. Stronger civic intermediaries. In other words, a more robust Habermasian answer. And perhaps that is true, up to a point. I do not dismiss that possibility. I do not think the alternative is simply nihilism or anti-institutional romance. But I am no longer convinced that reinforcing the institutions that gave shape to modernity will by itself resolve the crisis. Even a more regulated public sphere — even a Europe willing to discipline large tech platforms more seriously — would not automatically restore the social conditions under which communicative reason could flourish. And it is not hard to imagine such regulation producing its own backlash, its own counter-narratives of censorship, control, or elite overreach. The problem, in other words, may be deeper than a lack of rules. This is my inference, not a direct quotation from Habermas or any one source, but it unfolds from the institutional ambition at the heart of his work.
That is why I increasingly suspect that the real issue is modernity itself. Or at least the version of modernity within which Habermas still tried to work. His entire project can be read as a heroic attempt to save the normative promise of modernity from its own disasters: to preserve reason without metaphysics, democracy without foundations, universality without dogma. It is one of the grandest efforts in postwar thought. But what if the present has exposed not merely the fragility of those hopes, but the limits of the horizon in which they were formulated? What if our problem is not only that the public sphere is distorted, but that the modern distinction between rational deliberation and power, between communication and domination, was always more unstable than Habermas wanted to admit? That question is, again, interpretive, but it is anchored in the broad outlines of Habermas’s legacy as a defender of democratic rationality and postmetaphysical modernity.
This is where Bruno Latour’s formula — we have never been modern — begins to resonate for me in a new way. Latour’s point was that modernity told itself a myth: that it had clearly separated nature from society, subject from object, facts from values. In reality, as summaries of his argument note, we have always lived among hybrids, networks, and mixtures in which humans and non-humans, knowledge and institutions, society and things are co-constituted. If that is true, then perhaps our current crisis should not be understood merely as the corruption of an otherwise modern public sphere, but as the exposure of a contradiction that was there all along. We thought public reason could stand apart from power; in fact, it was always mediated by material infrastructures, embodied histories, and strategic dispositifs. We thought modern institutions could neutralize domination; in fact, they often reorganized it in subtler forms.
This, to me, is the larger lesson that links West Virginia, As Pontes, Habermas, Foucault, and Latour. Mining communities must revisit their histories and ask who they are, what they have been, and how their attachments were formed. But perhaps Western societies have to do something similar on a larger scale. We may need to ask more uncomfortable questions about our own recent history, about the institutions we trusted, about the universals we invoked, about the public sphere we imagined, about the technologies we welcomed, and about the forms of power we mistook for communication. If so, the task before us is not merely to defend modernity better, but to rethink it more radically. That leap from local extractive identities to a general diagnosis of Western modernity is my own synthesis, but it grows directly out of the coal cases, my own work on extractive belonging, and Latour’s critique of modern separation.
None of this makes Habermas irrelevant. Quite the opposite. He remains essential precisely because he names, with unusual clarity, what would be lost if we abandoned the aspiration to public reason altogether. Without some commitment to validity, argument, and shared criteria, democracy collapses into pure competition between apparatuses of visibility. Without Habermas, critique easily slides into fatalism. But without Foucault, Habermas risks sounding innocent about the actual conditions under which truth circulates. And without something like Latour, both of them risk remaining too confined within a modern frame that may no longer be adequate to the world we inhabit. That closing triangulation is interpretive, but it reflects the tension this essay has been working through from beginning to end.
So when I think of Habermas now, I think not only of a towering intellectual or a canonical theorist of democracy. I think of a moment in my own formation. Of lecture notes. Of theory classes. Of teachers who refused to reduce education to training. Of the excitement of discovering that social theory could illuminate the world, but also unsettle it. I also think of those mornings at UFZ, of using the blog as a repository for readings that seemed to matter, of trying to connect environmental sociology, post-mining futures, restoration, and theory, and of how natural it once felt to return to Habermas as a thinker of the public sphere and democratic mediation. That memory matters to me because it preserves not just an argument but a whole intellectual atmosphere: the sense that theory still offered orientation, that rereading was itself a form of fieldwork, and that a blog could function as an archive of unfinished thoughts one might want to revisit years later.
And I think, too, of the need to read Habermas today without piety. To read him with gratitude, but also against the grain. To see both what he made possible and what the present has made difficult. If I return to this text years from now, I would like to remember exactly that tension: that Habermas taught me to value the ambition of a rational, democratic public life, but that the world we now live in makes it hard not to admit that Foucault saw something fundamental that Habermas never fully absorbed. And that perhaps the question before us is no longer simply how to rescue the public sphere, but how to rethink the very modern horizon in which the public sphere once seemed imaginable.
