Georgian London had around 3,000 coffee houses. For a penny a cup, a merchant, a shopkeeper or a gentleman could sit down together, read the newspapers spread before them, and argue about the affairs of Parliament, the conduct of the war against France, or the merits of the latest edition of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator. The most powerful account of this world, and of its destruction, was perhaps unexpectedly written not by an English historian but by a German philosopher born into a provincial middle-class household in North Rhine-Westphalia, who died on Saturday in the Bavarian town of Starnberg at the age of 96.

Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929 into the kind of provincial, educated German household that had neither resisted nor much assisted Hitler’s regime. At 15 he was sent to the Western Front in the last chaotic months of the war. What followed shaped his cultural and political outlook: the Nuremberg revelations, the slow reckoning with what had been done in Germany’s name against the Jews, and a conviction, arrived at young and never abandoned, that the liberal constitutional state as it had developed in the English-speaking world represented a genuine civilisational achievement. Years later he described himself, with characteristic precision, as a ‘product of re-education’.

He studied philosophy and literature at Bonn and wrote a doctoral dissertation – as one might have expected – on the thought of the German idealist philosopher FWJ Schelling. In 1956 he came to the city that would mark him, personally and intellectually: Frankfurt. He worked there as assistant to Theodor Adorno at the Institute for Social Research – the Frankfurt School – although his time there was brief and not entirely happy. Max Horkheimer, who regarded the young Habermas as a dangerous Marxist, effectively pushed him out within three years. Habermas then moved to Marburg, where he embarked on the habilitation thesis that any serious German academic must endure: a second doctorate, on an entirely different subject, submitted before a new committee. The result, published in 1962, was The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the work for which, outside the philosophy departments, he deserves to be best remembered.

Frankfurt seemed to have for Habermas a gravitational pull. He returned there in the latter half of the 1960s, teaching in febrile political circumstances. The caricature of Habermas as a Continental Marxist intellectual does not survive close scrutiny. Unlike Althusser or the French soixante-huitards, he directly criticised the German students for acting out revolutionary fantasies and provoking the police into violence. The real alternative, he insisted, was ‘radical reformism’, pursued through liberal democratic institutions, not against them. His relationship to the ‘Frankfurt School’ was in any case looser than is usually supposed: he had been at the Institute for barely three years, and his intellectual debts ran in several directions at once. In 1971 he moved to Bavaria, where, over the following decade, he produced his magnum opus, the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action.

Again, he returned to Frankfurt in 1982 for a last time, remaining there, apart from visiting professorships in the United States, until his retirement in 1994. During these mature years he published extensively on moral philosophy and produced Between Facts and Norms, his major work in the realm of political and legal theory, which argued that legitimate law must be grounded in democratic deliberation rather than imposed from above.

Throughout his long career Habermas assumed the role of a public intellectual with brio, intervening in disputes about positivism in the social sciences, the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust, German re-unification, even genetic engineering. Most remarkably, he engaged in a sustained philosophical dialogue on secularism and religion with Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, perhaps the most formidable Catholic theologian of the 20th century.

Retirement and old age did not slow him down. He continued to write and intervene, publishing in 2022 a brief sequel to his earliest work on the public sphere, in which he turned his attention to the corrosive effects of digital media on democratic discourse. That the last thing Habermas published was, in essence, a return to the question he had first posed in 1962 tells us something about where the centre of gravity in his thought truly lay: not in the abstractions of communicative rationality or discourse ethics, formidable and obscure as those constructions were, but in a stubbornly historical question: what became of the culture of reasoned public debate that had once flourished in the coffee-houses and the pages of periodicals of 18th-century England?

The historical core of Habermas’s most influential work takes the London of the late 17th and early 18th centuries as its paradigmatic case: the coffee-houses, the periodical press, the gentlemen’s clubs. Habermas’ argument focuses on a specific constitutional moment. When Parliament allowed the 1662 Licensing Act to lapse in 1695, it removed the apparatus of pre-publication censorship and broke the Stationers’ monopoly over the book trade. What followed was a transformation in the conditions of public discourse. Publication rates surged. Hacks multiplied. The number of periodical issues quadrupled within a generation, creating a veritable ‘Republic of Letters’. Provincial printing expanded and book prices fell to their lowest level since the introduction of the press – and so did the cost of entry into public argument with them.

This all took place in the coffee-houses, London being thick with them. Their ethos was codified, sometimes in verse. The rules posted in Paul Greenwood’s establishment in 1674 capture something of the atmosphere Habermas found so compelling and irresistible: ‘Gentry, Tradesmen, all are welcome hither,/ And may without Affront sit down Together:/ Pre-eminence of Place, none here should Mind,/ But take the next fit Seat that he can find.’ Addison and Steele estimated that every copy of the Spectator reached some 20 readers, many of them encountered in precisely these rooms, where newspapers were shared, pamphlets debated and forgotten the next day, and the affairs of the latest royal scandal, ministerial restructuring, commercial treaty, and literature discussed over dishes of beef, beer and coffee. It was from this culture, Habermas argued, that something genuinely new emerged: a sphere of private people come together as a public body, reasoning collectively about matters of common concern, and, in doing so, exerting a pressure on the authorities that no previous arrangement had permitted.

He identified three features that distinguished the new public sphere from anything that had preceded it. First, it disregarded social status: what mattered in the coffee-houses was the force of the argument and not the rank of the man who made it. Second, it opened to critical discussion domains that had previously been the monopoly of church and state, from the latest theological controversy to the Navigation Acts. Third, it was in principle inclusive (a term that in Habermas’s usage carried historical precision): however restricted the actual membership might be, the public sphere understood itself as open.

Habermas was not naïve, and he knew that the reality fell short of the principle. He acknowledged that participation often depended on property and education (although newspapers were often read aloud for the benefit of those who could not read), that the leading figures of the new moneyed interest came from the conservative strata of a ‘high-bourgeoisie’ intimately involved with the nobility, and that the economically uppermost classes had by 1688 come to dominate politically as well. The ideal of equal rational debate was not, he conceded, ‘actually realised in earnest in the coffee-houses, but as an idea it had become institutionalised and thereby stated as an objective claim. If not realised, it was at least consequential’.

It is in the second half of the book that Habermas’ melancholy at the heart of his intellectual enterprise is revealed. Having described the emergence of this culture with something close to admiration, he turned to its destruction. The process he called ‘re-feudalisation’ traced how, over the course of the Victorian Era and beyond, mass media, advertising, public relations and consumerism hollowed out the substance of public debate. The press, which in the days of Lord Bolingbroke’s the Craftsman and John Wilkes’ North Briton had once served as a critical organ holding power to account, became an instrument of the manufacture of consent. Opinion was no longer formed through reasoned exchange among educated citizens, but engineered from above and consumed passively below. The public, in Habermas’s unsparing phrase, went from being a culture-debating to culture-consuming body.

There is something unmistakably conservative about this diagnosis, in the sense of temperament, though Habermas would not have welcomed the description. The lament for a world of propertied gentlemen reasoning together in the kind of establishments Dr Johnson loved to frequent, destroyed by the vulgarities of commercial democracy, could have been written by any number of 19h-century Tory pessimists, from John Croker to Lord Hugh Cecil. At the same time, it echoes Adorno, himself a vastly cultured man, on the culture industry and shares a sensibility with the broader Frankfurt School suspicion that mass society corrodes everything it touches.

Nor was this Habermas’ only concession to positions more usually associated with defenders of tradition. In his later years he insisted, to the astonishment of many admirers, that the egalitarian universalism of the West springs directly from the ethics of Jewish justice and Christian love, and that there is, in his own words, no alternative to this inheritance. As he remarked on religion and post-metaphysical thinking, ‘There should be a shift in dialogical attitudes towards religious traditions, the semantical potential of which is not yet exhausted.’ In his celebrated dialogue with Ratzinger, he urged secular society to acquire a new understanding of religious convictions rather than dismissing them as relics. Finally, during the now largely forgotten post-modernism debates of the 1980s, he had been the great defender of Enlightenment reason against the de-constructionists, reminding them against their most destructive instincts that the project of modernity was worth completing rather than bringing down. Someone who valued the western rational tradition and objected to the nihilistic turn in Continental philosophy under Foucault and his disciples would have found in Habermas, on all three counts, an unexpected fellow-traveller.

Yet for all these affinities with conservative temperament, Habermas remained committed to a progressive framework. He inherited the Frankfurt School’s cultural pessimism and gave it historical shape. What he could not do, given his progressive commitments, was draw the conclusion that his own evidence suggested: that the public sphere worked not in spite of its exclusions but in part because of some of them, and that the conditions of its flourishing were inseparable from the particular social order, propertied, classically educated and hierarchical in which it arose.

It was Habermas’ critics on the left who saw the opening clearly enough. Within a year of the English translation of Public Sphere appearing in 1989, the American philosopher Nancy Fraser had mounted an influential attack on the public sphere as exclusive, arguing that what Habermas presented as a universal forum was in reality the self-regarding conversation of a narrow class. Historian Harold Mah pressed further, contending that the public sphere rested on a ‘double fiction’: it had never been genuinely universal, and the abstract individualism it pre-supposed had never existed. Alan Downie, also working as an historian rather than a theorist, questioned the evidence on which Habermas had built his English case.

Much of this criticism hits its mark. Habermas himself, in later reflections, conceded that he had overstated the rationality of the early public sphere in order to sharpen the contrast with its decline. And yet the critics, paradoxically in the very act of demolishing Habermas’s idealisation, confirmed the substance of what he had described. The coffee-houses did foster a culture of debate governed by rules of civility and manners. The periodical press did create a new relationship between public opinion and Parliament, especially after the 1760s.

The reality is that even with its limitations, the 18th-century public sphere produced the freest press in Europe, the most durable parliamentary culture able to sustain and contain revolutionary fervour, and a constitutional settlement that proved exportable across the English-speaking world and beyond. The conditions of its success in this sense were inseparable from its exclusions. Edmund Burke, who sat in the coffee-houses and wrote for the press that Habermas admired, would have understood this instinctively: liberty is not an abstraction to be universalised at will, but an inheritance, carried by historically rooted institutions and established habits of mind.

Habermas then, for all the apparatus of the Frankfurt School, wrote the most powerful modern account of why this particular civilisation mattered. He spent the rest of his career trying to escape the implications of his own argument, returning aged 93 to find the culture he had first described now further degraded by the fragmenting force of technology. Social media, he argued, had shattered the already weakened public sphere into self-enclosed fragments: echo-chambers in which opinion circulates without challenge, algorithms that reward outrage over argument, and a collapse of the distinction between the private and the public that the 18th-century coffee-house had been careful to maintain. The mediating institutions on which representative democracy depended, above all a professional press governed by norms of factuality, were being hollowed out from within. It was the re-feudalisation thesis restated for the age of the smartphone, and it carried the unmistakable tone of a man who had watched the culture he most admired recede still further from reach.

The obituaries will honour Habermas as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. But the work that will endure longest is the one that began in the coffee-houses of Georgian London, and whose deepest insight was, in the end, a conservative one: that the conditions of rational public life are fragile, historically contingent, and not easily recovered once lost.