Jurgen Habermas spent decades championing Verfassungspatriotismus - constitutional patriotism - the idea that citizens could pledge loyalty to a republic while discarding the tribal and national identities that had shaped human civilization. His former student Alexander Karp now says that noble vision has fallen short.
Habermas's hope amounted to "a sort of disembodied political identity, untethered from the inconvenient particularities of family and culture," Karp wrote in a memoir for Politico after the philosopher's death last week at 96, as "Hvylya" reports. It "represented an aspirational cosmopolitanism that has proven insufficient to animate allegiance in the modern era."
The Palantir Technologies CEO, who studied under Habermas at Goethe University in Frankfurt through the 1990s, offered a pointed counterargument to his mentor's thinking. Where Habermas believed in "the possibility of a purely rational public discourse," Karp wrote that he believed such discourse "must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional - and indeed national and cultural - source."
Der Spiegel described Habermas as "the last European" back in 2011, as the continental governance project he championed came under sustained pressure. The years since have only deepened the challenge, with nationalism resurgent across Europe and beyond.
Karp acknowledged Habermas "may yet be vindicated" - but added a blunt caveat: "I fear not in our time."
Previously: Trump's Europe Pullback Meets Russia's 3-5 Year War Timeline: PISM Identifies a Dangerous Gap.