An Obituary from the Perspective of Architectural Theory

With Jürgen Habermas, who passed away in March 2026, philosophy and the social sciences have lost what was probably their most internationally prominent voice from Germany. As Detlef Horster once wrote, the Düsseldorf-born thinker who became the central representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School broke down barriers “both between theoretical traditions, such as the continental European and the American, and between various individual theoretical disciplines.”[1] This is how the almost boundless influence of Habermas is to be understood. “His encyclopaedic knowledge,” Horster continued, “made it possible for historians, educationalists, and psychologists to argue over his theory.”[2] This applies to architecture and its theoretical discourse above all. As shall be reconstructed below, architecturally relevant statements by Habermas are found first in his 1962 work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and then above all in his magnificent Munich lecture “Modern and Postmodern Architecture” from 1981, which ought to be absent from no serious overview of contemporary thinking on planning and building.[3] But Jürgen Habermas the client—who had a remarkable family home built for himself in Starnberg—also deserves mention in this context, not least because one of the most important philosopher’s houses of the twentieth century thereby came into being, one that now faces an uncertain future.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)

The “Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society” that Habermas announces in the subtitle of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, with its almost modestly deployed indefinite article, is the one most strongly tied to space. Accordingly, the book already in its first chapter targets the problem of speaking of “public buildings,” which does not mean their “general accessibility”: “(…) they simply house state institutions and as such are “public”.”[4] Since then, the “public sphere”—a concept that has existed in German only since the eighteenth century, formed by analogy with the French publicité and the English publicity—has clung to both representative and non-representative architectures, just as in the Middle Ages it clung to rulers as a marker of status. By “structural transformation of the public sphere” Habermas means a complex and spatially potent transformation of social organisation that enabled the bourgeoisie, in the course of the Enlightenment and the long nineteenth century, to emancipate itself from feudal rule—but which, as the social scientist writes with an eye to current events of the 1950s and early 1960s, in turn brings with it the dangers of a “refeudalization of the public sphere”:[5] monarchical-style representation returned then with full force, this time in the form of public relations by private companies and their owners, who, with the help of an “engineering of consent” and suitable “opinion-molding services,”[6] knew how to present their private interests as general ones—which is, as is well known, also an architectural and urbanistic theme that has lost none of its relevance, quite the contrary.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere reads in passages like a plan atlas without floor plans. Habermas describes with striking architectural examples how the courtly-knightly public sphere was first supplanted by the urban aristocratic culture of early-capitalist northern Italy, and later in Paris and London by a “renewed representative public sphere,”[7] discovering parks and palace halls as safe spaces “of a society separating itself from the state.”[8] Culminating in Versailles, there was a simultaneous shrinkage and intensification of the “representative public sphere,” to be understood as a “reserve in the midst of a society separating itself from the state”: “Only now do private and public spheres separate in a specifically modern sense.”[9] In parallel, in Paris—for example in the Hôtel de Rambouillet of Catherine de Vivonne, the Marquise de Rambouillet—“ the great hall at court in which the prince staged his festivities and as patron gathered the artists about him was replaced by what later would be called the salon.”[10] This femininely connoted space, which Habermas presents as the “cultural heir to the court”[11] and thus as a key category in the differentiation of a bourgeois public sphere from the context of an aristocracy freeing itself from the hermetic society of the court, becomes by the mid-eighteenth century the ideal of a social coexistence of women and men of different social origins, radiating out to English coffee-houses and German Tischgesellschaften [table societies], to theatres, museums, and concert halls.[12] In grand bourgeois town houses on the European continent, the salon became over the course of the nineteenth century the most significant room: “The line between private and public sphere,” Habermas writes,  “extended right through the home. The privatized individuals stepped out of the intimacy of their living rooms into the public sphere of the salon, but the one was strictly complementary to the other.”[13] Its literary-publicistic charge made it the birthplace of “public opinion” in its contest with “public authority.”

It is part of the irony of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’s genesis that the completion of the book was owed to a Habilitation project whose supervisor was originally intended to be Max Horkheimer—who, although politically quite far left, was anything but comfortable with the revolutionary disposition he suspected in Habermas. Habermas thus switched, as a kind of Plan B, to Wolfgang Abendroth, the Marburg political scientist and at the time the only openly Marxist academic in West Germany—yet what he submitted to him was a work that presents bourgeois public sphere as one grown out of mercantilism, and traces the emergence of a “ sphere of the “social,” which broke the fetters of domination based on landed estate and necessitated forms of administration” back to the spread of market relations.[14] In short, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere reads over long stretches like a defence of the idea of private property that, while by no means conservative, is nonetheless appreciative, in which the liberal public sphere fares better than the plebeian one because the “educated strata” made no moves to shed their “literary garb.”[15] This was quasi identical with Horkheimer’s own habitus. Accordingly, one almost detects a note of quiet melancholy when Habermas writes of his present: “The closedness of the private home, clearly indicated to the outside by front yard and fence and made possible on the inside by the individualized and manifold structuring of rooms, is no longer the norm today, just as, conversely, its openness to the social intercourse of a public sphere was endangered by the disappearance of the salon and of rooms for the reception of visitors in general.”[16]

The Two Lectures “Modernity – An Incomplete Project” (1980) and “Modern and Postmodern Architecture” (1981)

Some twenty years after The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere—the young scholar had by now become one of Germany’s most highly regarded philosophers—he was awarded the Adorno Prize in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche in September 1980. Habermas used his acceptance lecture, entitled “Modernity – An Incomplete Project,” for a wholesale reckoning with the postmodern Zeitgeist, which he also and above all saw materialised in the recently opened first Architecture Biennale in Venice. He spared no criticism of the The Presence of the Past exhibition curated by Paolo Portoghesi. It placed an “avant-garde with reversed fronts” at its centre and stood for an “affective current that has penetrated the pores of all intellectual domains and summoned up theories of post-Enlightenment, of postmodernity, of post-history, etc.—in short, a new conservatism.”[17] This, Habermas suggested, contrasted with Adorno and his work. So the prize recipient recommends “that we learn from the aberrations that have accompanied the project of modernity, from the mistakes of extravagant programmes of abolition, rather than surrendering modernity and its project.”[18] He said this not only before the eyes of Frankfurt’s CDU Lord Mayor Walter Wallmann as representative of the then notoriously right-wing Hessian CDU of Alfred Dregger and Alexander Gauland, but also in the direction of a very young party founded that same year in Karlsruhe: the Greens. Accordingly, Habermas closed with the remark: “As I fear, the ideas of anti-modernism, with the addition of a pinch of pre-modernism, are gaining ground in the circles of the Greens and alternative groups.”[19]

One year after the Adorno Prize lecture, Habermas became something of a part-time architectural theorist in Munich’s Haus der Bayerischen Rückversicherung when he opened the exhibition Die andere Tradition. Architektur in München von 1800 bis heute [The Other Tradition. Architecture in Munich from 1800 to Today], conceived by Wend Fischer and designed by Otl Aicher, with his lecture “Modern and Postmodern Architecture”. With its focus on iron construction and the history of engineering, the exhibition deliberately set a counterpoint to Portoghesi’s Architecture Biennale. Habermas took his Paulskirche lecture into extra time, so to speak—and emphasised as the starting point of any discussion of modern and postmodern architecture three challenges for planning and building in the nineteenth century: “the qualitatively new needs for architectural design, new materials and construction techniques, and the subjection of building to new functional, primarily economic imperatives”[20] While the modern movement, according to Habermas, answered the first two challenges in the twentieth century “in principle, responded correctly”, it was “essentially helpless in the face of systemic dependencies on the imperatives of the market and administrative planning.”[21]

While the Modern Movement recognized and, i the challenges presented by qualitatively new needs and new technical design possibilities, it was essentially helpless in the face of systemic dependencies on the imperatives of the market and administrative planning

He thus places high hopes in an improved understanding of what he calls “system functionality.”[22] For Habermas this encompasses unforeseeable consequences of actions and chains of decisions that none of the participants intended: “The problems of urban planning are not primarily problems of design but problems of regulation, problems of containing and managing systemic imperatives that encroach on the urban lifeworld and threaten to consume its urban substance.”[23] These are sentences more than 45 years old that have aged well and could still today adorn any debate on the conservative project of a “Stadtbaukunst” [civic architecture] yearning for “the beauty of the city.”[24] All the more so since they simultaneously also take aim at the “alternative architecture” with its “longing for de-differentiated ways of life,” its “cult of the rooted and veneration of the banal”—a streak that also runs through current, antisemitism-tinged glorifications of indigeneity by sections of the architectural milieu that inscribes “Care” on its activist banners.[25]

Habermas’ architectural-theoretical intervention of the early 1980s quickly found fertile ground in the world of planning and building.[26] Kenneth Frampton describes it as a central “motivation” for his equally influential though syncretic essay “Critical Regionalism – Theses on an Architecture of Resistance” (1983, German 1986),[27] which also opposes what he calls the “popular revisionism”[28] of the Portoghesi show, yet in its critique of it invokes, of all people, Martin Heidegger. Nothing could have been further from Habermas’ mind. Notwithstanding this, Frampton praises him for having accurately noticed the “reactionary” character of the Venetian set pieces’ “scenographic and highly ideological gesture.”[29] Frampton was not to be the only Habermas adept in the field of architectural theory: a generation (or thereabouts) of predominantly German-speaking sixty-eighters drew, in their struggle against the rightward turn feared even then in the Federal Republic, on their older brother from the Flak auxiliary generation. Too rarely was it noticed that Habermas’ foray into architectural theory coincided with the publication of his magnum opus, the 1981 Theory of Communicative Action, in which “lifeworld” functions as the complementary concept to “system.”[30] This work contains a page-long communication-philosophical exegesis of a typical construction-site situation, rather agreeable reading for architects: “An older construction worker who sends a younger and newly arrived co-worker to fetch some beer, telling him to hurry it up and be back in a few minutes, supposes that the situation is clear to everyone involved—here, the younger worker and any other workers within hearing distance. The theme is the upcoming midmorning snack; taking care of the drinks is a goal related to this theme; one of the older workers comes up with the plan to send the “new guy who, given his status, cannot easily get around this request. The informal group hierarchy of the workers on the construction site is the normative framework in which the one is allowed to tell the other to do something. The action situation is defined temporally by the upcoming break and spatially by the distance from the site to the nearest store.”[31] And so it continues for many pages, until it should have become entirely clear that the “peculiar non-coercive coercion of the better argument,” which orients the book like a compass needle toward a “better world,” in everyday life runs up against the limits of the ideal of domination-free discourse.

The Habermas House in Starnberg of 1971/72 – and a Visit in 2014

Roughly halfway between the publications of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and “Modern and Postmodern Architecture,” Habermas—who had held the chair for philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt from 1964—moved to Starnberg, where until 1981 he co-directed with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker the newly founded Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World.[32] From the architects Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Sattler, who had until then worked in the planning department of the Neue Heimat Bayern, he had an architecturally remarkable house built for himself and his family in 1971/72 on a hillside at Ringstraße 8b.

It was built in the midst of the so-called “Habermas–Luhmann Debate,” in which Habermas represented the position of a social theory with emancipatory ambitions, while Luhmann, rather than applying utopian standards, preferred to describe the status quo of functionally differentiated, autopoietic systems.[33] During the design phase, the client was in close contact with the writer-architect Max Frisch, from whose house in Ticino Habermas even sent a letter with sketches to his architects, in which he wished for a “lovely house on a hillside, built fairly strictly in the manner of Corbusier.”[34] And so it more or less turned out: the building appears modest and two-storey from the street, like Le Corbusier’s Citrohan type; yet on the valley side, the elongated cube rises self-confidently and three-storeys tall, as if it were the aisle of a machine à habiter.

Not only the outer appearance of the house follows largely modern models of the early twentieth century, with its white plaster and metal windows; even the organisation of the interior clearly owes a debt to Adolf Loos’s “Raumplan” with its interlocking of different ceiling heights—for example in the single-storey dining area, from which one looks down into the two-storey living room with fireplace and enormous bookcase—a veritable salon of the late twentieth century.

The house is crowned by a spiral staircase-accessed rooftop exit enclosed in glass blocks, leading to a terrace with a curved privacy wall reminiscent of the roof of the Casa Malaparte on Capri, made famous by Jean-Luc Godard’s film Contempt.

All in all, a house has been created that appears largely committed to the “project of modernity” in the sense of classical architectural modernism, and only at a few—albeit prominent—points, such as the large bay window of the living room with its 45-degree bevels, reveals its moment of creation.

In the Habermas House there has come into being what is probably the world’s unique case of a philosopher’s domicile whose architecture is not only of high quality but also of programmatic character, erected in the midst of a theory-theoretical debate about the standing of critical theory versus systems theory, and anticipating the explicit architectural-theoretical position of a philosopher of international standing. It seemed all the more plausible to me, shortly after taking up my teaching post at TU Munich in 2014, to make contact with the architect Christoph Sattler in order to visit Habermas together and put to him the idea of a book publication about the house. This also seemed urgent because well-known artists had regularly been in and out of the house (a 1974 photograph by Katharina Sattler shows from behind the gallerist Heiner Friedrich and the artist Blinky Palermo—the latter in discussion for a work in the entrance area—on their way to the house.

precisely placed abstract artworks are to be found there (Eduardo Chillida, Günter Frühtrunk, Hans Hartung, Jorge Oteiza, or Sean Scully[35]); photographs of the philosopher in his living room accompanied the reporting on West German intellectual history (Isolde Ohlbaum photographed him there in 2008 and 2014[36] and not least because Luhmann occasionally played table tennis on the terrace.[37] The visit took place together with the architect on 30 September 2014.

we were warmly received by Ute and Jürgen Habermas, there was a house tour that did not omit the secondary rooms, followed by coffee and cake. In conversation it became clear that Habermas was thoroughly aware en detail of the subsequent development of his architects, who with his house built both their debut and the last stylistically modern building they would produce, and who in 1974 officially founded the office “Hilmer & Sattler,” committed to a moderately postmodern architecture. To the idea of a book publication about the house, the couple reacted with the greatest scepticism: “We don’t want a lifestyle feature and we are also not narcissists!” “The last thing we want are architecture tourists standing in front of our house and possibly wandering around in the garden!” “No book while we are alive! Get in touch with our children after we die!” The “goodbye” sounded like the tactful version of “goodbye forever.” Ute Habermas died on 9 June 2025, and Jürgen Habermas—deeply marked not only by the death of his wife but also by that of his daughter Rebekka, who had already died in 2023—passed away on 14 March 2026. In his house. What will become of the building, which is not (yet) under listed-building protection, is currently unclear. Much is conceivable—and covers the full spectrum from fears of demolition to conversion into a kind of “German Villa Massimo.”[38]

The temporary failure of the envisaged book project probably also had another, deeper reason: looking me over carefully, Habermas repeatedly spoke of “your club”—and meant the intellectual stable smell of the Peter Sloterdijk student. Here too he was informed not only about my dissertation Geschichte des Korridors [A History of the Corridor], supervised by Sloterdijk, but also about the important role that The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere plays within it. The latter helped little in that moment, however, for above all following Sloterdijk’s Elmau lecture (“Rules for the Human Zoo,” 1999), the highly critical reactions to it from Habermas’s circle, and the subsequent open letter from Sloterdijk to Habermas, the bridges had been burnt.[39] Accordingly, Sloterdijk’s subsequent published work is riddled with jibes against the Starnberg philosopher: in Die Sonne und der Tod [The Sun and Death] (2001), for example, he accuses the dialogue-theoretically conceived “Habermas model” of “a monological tendency that cannot be concealed, indeed a Jacobin core”—“if by Jacobinism one understands the constantly callable readiness to enforce consensus”[40]—and in Die nehmende Hand und die gebende Seite [The Taking Hand and the Giving Side] (2010) he laments the widening gap between the theory and practice of communicative action: he had, he says, issued six invitations to Habermas for a duel—always in vain.[41] Sloterdijk’s circle of friends, for all its heterogeneity, was also quite unanimous in its criticism of Habermas: thus Jochen Hörisch, in his Theorie-Apotheke [The Theory Pharmacy], doubts whether consensus is the regulative idea of communication: “We communicate incessantly precisely because we cannot reach understanding or achieve consensus. Dissent, not consensus, is the regulative idea of communication.”[42] This is not the place to resurrect that debate, but in conclusion it should be noted that it is surely no coincidence that one of the important philosophical voices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was able to lastingly shape planning and building not through a theory of conflict but through a theory of consensus—and this both intellectually and by building. And it is not only the originator of these theories who can take pride in this, but the entire discipline he addressed.

Prof. Dr. phil. Stephan Trüby (* 1970) is Professor of Architectural Theory and Director of the Institute for the Foundations of Modern Architecture and Design (IGmA) at the University of Stuttgart. Previously he was Professor of Temporary Architecture at the HfG Karlsruhe (2007–09), directed the postgraduate programme MAS Scenography/Spatial Design at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (2009–2014), taught architectural theory at Harvard University (2012–2014), and was Professor of Architecture and Cultural Theory at TU Munich (2014–2018). His most important books include, alongside his Geschichte des Korridors [A History of the Corridor] (2018), which grew out of a dissertation supervised by Peter Sloterdijk: Exit-Architektur. Design zwischen Krieg und Frieden [Exit Architecture. Design Between War and Peace] (2008), The World of Madelon Vriesendorp (2008, with Shumon Basar), Germania, Venezia: Die deutschen Beiträge zur Architekturbiennale Venedig seit 1991 – Eine Oral History [Germania, Venice: The German Contributions to the Venice Architecture Biennale since 1991 – An Oral History] (2016, with Verena Hartbaum), Absolute Architekturbeginner: Schriften 2004–2014 [Absolute Architecture Beginner: Writings 2004–2014] (2017), and, most recently, Right-wing Spaces. Political Essays (2026).

Footnotes:

[1]Detlef Horster: Jürgen Habermas zur Einführung [Introduction to Jürgen Habermas], Hamburg: Junius, 2001, p. 147.

[2]Horster, Jürgen Habermas zur Einführung, op. cit., p. 146.

[3]Jürgen Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture,” in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 412. Originally delivered as a lecture at the opening of the exhibition “Die andere Tradition: Architektur in München von 1800 bis heute,” Munich, November 1981. Translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, first published in Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

[4]Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989; paperback edition 1991) p. 2

[5]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, op. cit., p. 195.

[6]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, cit., pp. 194

[7]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 4

[8]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 11

[9]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 11

[10]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 31

[11]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 32

[12]Cf. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 36

[13]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 45

[14]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 142

[15]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. xviii

[16]Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 157

[17]Jürgen Habermas: “Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt. Rede aus Anlass der Verleihung des Adorno-Preises in der Frankfurter Paulskirche” [Modernity – An Incomplete Project. Address on the Occasion of the Adorno Prize Award Ceremony in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche] (1980), in (idem): Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt. Philosophisch-politische Aufsätze 1977–1990, Leipzig: Reclam, 1990, p. 32.

[18]Habermas, “Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt”, op. cit., p. 49.

[19]Habermas, “Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt”, op. cit., pp. 53f.

[20]Habermas, “Moderne and Postmoderne Architecture”, op. cit., p. 419

[21]Habermas, “Moderne und postmoderne Architektur”, op. cit., p. 422.

[22]Cf. Stephan Trüby: “Funktion, Programm, Ereignis” [Function, Programme, Event], in: Gerd de Bruyn, Stephan Trüby (eds.): architektur_theorie.doc. Texte seit 1960, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003, p. 155.

[23]Ibid.

[24]Cf. Stephan Trüby: “Trüby liest: Bücher zur europäischen Stadt” [Trüby Reads: Books on the European City], in: archplus.net, February 2024 (https://archplus.net/de/trueby-liest-buecher-zur-europaeischen-stadt/; last accessed 11 April 2026).

[25]Cf. the critique of Charlotte Malterre-Barthes by Jasmin Arémi: “Architektur, Aktivismus, Antisemitismus?” [Architecture, Activism, Antisemitism?], in: mena-watch, 27 June 2025 (https://www.mena-watch.com/architektur-aktivismus-antisemitismus/); last accessed 11 April 2026.

[26]Jürgen Habermas: “Moderne und postmoderne Architektur” [Modern and Postmodern Architecture] (1981), in: Gerd de Bruyn, Stephan Trüby (eds.): architektur_theorie.doc. Texte seit 1960, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003. p. 168.

[27]Cf. Kenneth Frampton: “Kritischer Regionalismus – Thesen zu einer Architektur des Widerstands” [Critical Regionalism – Theses on an Architecture of Resistance], in Andreas Huyssen, Klaus R. Scherpe (eds.): Postmoderne. Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels [Postmodernism. Signs of a Cultural Change], Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986, p. 151.

[28]Frampton, “Kritischer Regionalismus”, op. cit., p. 154.

[29]Ibid.

[30]Cf. Horster, Jürgen Habermas zur Einführung, op. cit., p. 83.

[31]Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). Originally published as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 2: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981). p. 121.

[32]Cf. Verena Hartbaum: “Innere Paradoxien und äußere Zerfleischungsprozesse. Das Starnberger Institut zur Erforschung der Lebensbedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt und sein (architektonischer) Kontext” [Inner Paradoxes and External Processes of Self-Destruction. The Starnberg Institute for the Study of the Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World and its (Architectural) Context], in: Stephan Trüby, Verena Hartbaum University of Looking Good, c/o now (eds.): Bayern, München. 100 Jahre Freistaat. Eine Raumverfälschung [Bavaria, Munich. 100 Years of the Free State. A Spatial Distortion], Munich: Fink, 2019.

[33]Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann: Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? [Theory of Society or Social Technology – What Does Systems Research Achieve?], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971.

[34]Cf. Waltraud Indrist, Christine Rüb, Anh-Linh Ngo: “Haus Habermas. Bauen als gegenstandsbezogenes Handeln” [Habermas House. Building as Object-Oriented Action], in: ARCH+ 221: “Tausendundeine Theorie” [A Thousand and One Theories], Winter 2015, p. 94.

[35]Cf. Niklas Maak: “Die absolute Form und die Geschichte. Betrachtungen zum Haus Habermas” [Absolute Form and History. Reflections on Habermas House], in: Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte [Journal for the History of Ideas], Issue XV/3: “H wie Habermas” [H as in Habermas], Autumn 2021, p. 103.

[36]Cf. ibid.

[37]Cf. Julian Müller, Ansgar Lorenz: Niklas Luhmann. Philosophie für Einsteiger [Niklas Luhmann. Philosophy for Beginners], Paderborn: Fink, 2016, p. 20.

[38]Cf. Gerhard Matzig: “Deutsche Villa Massimo” [German Villa Massimo], in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11 April 2026 (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/haus-habermas-starnberg-villa-massimo-denkmalschutz-li.3462539?reduced=true; last accessed 11 April 2026).

[39]Cf. https://homepage.univie.ac.at/henning.schluss/seminare/023bildung_und_genetik/texte/04sloterdijk_an_%20assheuer_u_Habermas.htm; last accessed 11 April 2026.

[40]Peter Sloterdijk, in Peter Sloterdijk, Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs: Die Sonne und der Tod. Dialogische Untersuchungen [The Sun and Death. Dialogic Investigations], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006 (2001), p. 82.

[41]Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, in “Verschwendung für alle. Peter Sloterdijk im Gespräch mit Holger Fuß” [Squandering for All. Peter Sloterdijk in Conversation with Holger Fuß] (2009), in (idem): Die nehmende Hand und die gebende Seite [The Taking Hand and the Giving Side], Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, p. 115.

[42]Jochen Hörisch: Theorie-Apotheke. Eine Handreichung zu den humanwissenschaftlichen Theorien der letzten fünfzig Jahre, einschließlich ihrer Risiken und Nebenwirkungen [The Theory Pharmacy. A Guide to the Human Science Theories of the Last Fifty Years, Including Their Risks and Side Effects], Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2004, p. 167.