Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026): The utopian thinker’s intuitions for the civic and the public self

What are our resources for the practice of a radical freedom today, even as we serve as legal and political subjects of machines of state power?

Cynics would say this is all philosophical stuff – these questions have no link to “reality”. Jürgen Habermas showed us a higher wisdom; he gave us a way out of our loyal and coerced memberships in folds of belonging, and for supplementing such memberships with our capacity for celebrating each other and ourselves, ambivalent to the specificity of biography – to be in the presence of strangers, completely.

He was, for me, a utopian thinker. He showed a way for a sliver of such freedom to be even tangentially accessed by practising a democratic self, a stranger-sociability.

A practical formula

I learnt of the power of Habermas’s thought from my late teacher Bernard Bate, who famously wrote about town square oratory cultures and cultures of public address in the South Indian, Tamil, linguistic and social world. It is from Bate that I learnt the power of these ideas, in their potential for unshackling of folds of caste, religion, community, as also the possibilities for Habermas’s theory of the public to be taken to the postcolonial juggernaut of India.

In the public...

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