The recent passing of Jürgen Habermas, one of the defining intellectual figures of postwar Germany, marks the somber end of an era in which the normative foundations of liberal internationalism have increasingly been overshadowed by the resurgence of sovereign power and geopolitical coercion. Indeed, Habermas was perhaps the last major proponent of a postnational ideal of politics grounded in a Kantian vision of cosmopolitan reason. In this theory, states cooperate through rational consensus to overcome the antagonisms inherent to sovereignty. As the foremost theorist of deliberative democratic liberalism, he remained deeply committed to modernity as an “unfinished project” and grounded it in the secular ideal of rational communication. For him, rationality was the basis of democratic legitimacy and human emancipation.
Having lived through National Socialism and later experienced postwar reconstruction in Germany, Habermas belonged to a generation of thinkers for whom the emancipatory promise of modernity remained a profound historical and political question. Throughout his career as a sociologist and philosopher, he regarded human liberation as historically grounded, emerging as human beings expanded the possibilities of freedom and emancipation through rational communication and democratic public reason. Even under the conditions of late capitalism, Habermas argued, the lifeworld remained, however tenuously, open to emancipation insofar as communicative reason—a mode of social interaction oriented toward mutual understanding through rational dialogue—continued to provide the normative basis for democratic deliberation and collective political agency.
For the most part, the German philosopher maintained a remarkably consistent philosophical trajectory. For the young Habermas, the collapse of totalitarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century reopened the emancipatory promise of modern life within the democratic public sphere. This was so even amid the persistent risks of domination and violence embedded in political existence, particularly those brought about by commercialization and the consolidation of political and economic power. For the older Habermas, Enlightenment rationality continued to sustain the hope that humanity might approximate what Kant imagined as a self-legislating public, i.e., a form of collective life sustained through public deliberation and political participation. For him, communicative action civilized political authority. Constitutional democracy thus generated legitimacy through deliberation and public reason. In making this argument, Habermas gave philosophical expression to the normative political ideals of the postwar liberal international order. The democratic lifeworld thus remained the essential terrain through which communicative rationality could resist domination and preserve emancipatory horizons.
Yet with his death amid the current conflict with Iran, one senses something deeply allegorical. It is as though the passing of one of the last major defenders of communicative reason, and the democratic order it upheld, coincided with a geopolitical moment profoundly at odds with the world he sought to preserve. The European postnational idealism that Habermas so famously inherited now appears less as a political reality than as the fading afterlife of liberal modernity. It is increasingly eclipsed by a politics of permanent exception normalized through Israeli and U.S. state power. With the long war on Iran, in which military confrontation and economic warfare increasingly converge in sanctions regimes, what emerges is an expanding infrastructure of permanent conflict, one that advances through fractured publics and the accelerating pressures of geopolitical force. It is here that a sentence by Habermas, which I first encountered years ago while studying his work, returns with a certain historical irony: “Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from models supplied by another epoch; it has to create normativity out of itself” (7). Yet the present itself increasingly appears deprived of a political horizon capable of imagining anything beyond war and geopolitical domination.
The current conflict with Iran reveals that war, as organized political violence, has never been truly exceptional but instead belongs to the long durée of permanent emergency that has defined modernity since the early modern period. As a central feature of state formation since the seventeenth century, especially following the emergence of the fiscal-military state under France’s Louis XIV alongside the expansion of colonial extraction, the projection of force has shaped modern geopolitics.[1] The culmination of this project can be seen in the global ascendancy of American imperial power in the twentieth century. Later in the twentieth century, such projections ranged from the U.S.-led coup in Iran in 1953 to the overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973, from the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the global war on terror to the normalization of permanent military infrastructures throughout the Middle East and beyond.
If, as Carl Schmitt famously argued, sovereignty manifests itself through the temporary suspension of the juridical order in moments of war and crisis, contemporary warfare increasingly reveals the exception itself as the permanent condition through which political power operates. While the postwar international order offered the semblance of peace, especially with the creation of the European Union, which Habermas admired as one of the most promising experiments in moving beyond the nation-state model, the Cold War and post-Soviet era revealed the enduring logic of state power historically rooted in military might and territorial consolidation. From the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the current U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, contemporary geopolitics continues to unfold through what Charles Tilly (chap. 3) identified as the coercive logic of modern state formation, whereby war makes states and states make war.
But there is more to war than state-making. War also empowers the sovereign, which rules not simply through laws, but through its capacity to suspend the juridical order while claiming to preserve it. For the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, this logic is what ultimately renders law and violence indistinguishable within the state of exception as a “zone of anomie” outside of the juridical order, where human action is no longer bound by norms of law (esp. 59–60). The sovereign decision to suspend order in order to preserve order is fundamentally an act of will, and hence a sacralized undertaking in which law merely appears as a “spectral figure.” In other words, the “outside” is not external to the juridical order but constitutes the very mechanism through which sovereignty operates. Just as God willfully intervenes in the natural order through a miracle, the sovereign intervenes in the legal order through an exception, a secularized miracle through which modern politics preserves theological structures under secular language. The secular state may thus be understood as the continuation of political theology by other means.
I raise this point about the theological structure of the modern state, especially in its imperial form, to underscore a bitter irony in Habermas’s relation to the Iran war. Here, I am reminded of a moment from my graduate years at the European University Institute during a 2001 dissertation defense discussion between Habermas and the American political scientist Philippe Schmitter on the role of the public sphere and democratic legitimacy in a postnational European context. As one of the foremost theorists of democratic transition, Schmitter raised the question of whether a shared democratic political culture grounded in communication and public deliberation, rather than nationalism, could adequately confront the reality of “hard power.” To paraphrase his question: What about the state in its material force, which could seek to achieve political objectives through coercive means rather than persuasion? What still lingers in memory is Habermas quietly dismissing the point with a slight shake of his head, after which no further discussion followed.
Yet this response did not stem from any indifference to domination or to the militaristic logic embedded within modern political systems, both of which remained central to his broader critique of modernity. Rather, Habermas’s philosophical wager rested on the belief that communicative rationality and constitutional democracy still retained the capacity to domesticate sovereign violence through law and public reason. The non-response, however, also implied something deeper: his commitment to communicative rationality preserved a distinctly secular faith that constitutional institutions and public reason could ultimately contain the antagonisms of sovereign power. Such faith entailed a philosophical effort to preserve rationality from the theological residues that continue to structure modern sovereignty, particularly through the state of exception as a secularized analogue of the miracle. Despite living in an age in which transcendental sources of authority may no longer be deemed available, Habermas’s liberal belief in the rule of law carried a profound utopian commitment to preserving an imagined realm of the political separate from other spheres of life, such as the economy and religion, spheres with which coexistence could be forged, but never ontologically merged.
One could argue that Habermas’s faith in democratic reason retained the structure of a secularized faith, one that occluded his view of the state of exception at the heart of modern state power. True, Habermas strongly criticized the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war and especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he saw as bypassing international legality and undermining the fragile postnational order established after World War II. Yet, ironically, Habermas’s critique of the Iraq War largely treated it as an exception from the broader Enlightenment horizon of U.S. liberal politics, failing to recognize militarism and imperial domination as constitutive contradictions of liberal modernity rather than aberrations from it. The limits of this framework became especially apparent in Habermas’s reflections on Israel’s war on Gaza, insofar as the language of communicative reason and democratic legitimacy yielded to a historically conditioned justification of Israeli state violence.
While Gaza has revealed the limits of international law in confronting colonial violence, the conflict with Iran exposes even more starkly how the state of exception lies at the core of sovereignty. The 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—an agreement ratified and repeatedly verified through UN inspection regimes overseeing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure—demonstrated the normalization of the exception in the restructuring of the international order. It did so by subordinating multilateral legal frameworks and verification mechanisms to unilateral sovereign power exercised through sanctions and coercive pressure. This logic became especially visible in the doctrine of “maximum pressure,” which revealed a far more sinister manifestation of the exception, whereby economic warfare through sanctions normalized a slow violence against the Iranian population as leverage for political unrest. Such maximalist pressures operated through compliance systems and governance structures embedded within international economic networks that produced the systematic deprivation of economic life for Iranians. Meanwhile, especially under Trump’s second administration, diplomacy increasingly became a staged performance; instead of facilitating meaningful negotiation, it functioned to compel the perceived enemy into submission to the demands of power. Under such conditions, diplomacy increasingly assumed the logic of a modern Carthaginian peace, aimed at securing punitive submission through exhaustion. Law no longer appeared as a rational normative force restraining power, but increasingly as the juridical expression of sovereign will.
Against this backdrop, Habermas’s silence surrounding the long economic warfare and Israel’s 2025 military assault on Iran marked the exhaustion of the postnational horizon he once defended. What this silence reveals is how belief in a polity grounded in discourse can obscure the slow violence inflicted upon populations whose histories remain bound to states for which exceptionalism constitutes the very logic of hegemonic power.
In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin remarked that “the storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself” (109). Amid the conflict with Iran, Habermas’s liberal idealism of rational communication may now linger as a kind of story most visible at the edge of disappearance, where loss and transmission drift together under the shadow of perpetual war. Yet a deeper irony persists beneath this ending: Habermas’s liberalism may survive as an ethical reminder of another possible politics, almost as a posthumous public sphere in which reason survives less as political reality than as a necessary yet fragile fiction. Still, this fiction remains worth defending so long as we maintain a critical stance toward the structural forces shaping our lifeworld. At this critical juncture in history, what remains is an ethos of collective striving for a democracy to come, a quest that cannot be exhausted by any political system of exception, yet one that confronts claims to permanence that render war as a necessary condition of our all-too-precarious reality.
[1] For classic accounts of early modern state formation through military consolidation and infrastructural power, see Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1; and Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990, especially on the intertwined development of military organization, administrative centralization, and infrastructural forms of state power in early modern Europe. For discussions of European modernity and state formation as intertwined with colonial extraction and racial slavery in connection with imperial violence, see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
