Blair’s ex-speech writer on Jurgen Habermas (1929-2026). .
Philip Collins was a speech writer for Blair back in the day. More recently he was a Times columnist for a period and nowadays pops up in the New Statesman. He has written an obituary of the Frankfurt School theorist Jurgen Habermas for Prospect magazine.
Its notable for making no reference to Marxism or the left, although this broadly was where Habermas situated himself for most of his life. Even The Times lengthy obituary made a few nods in this direction.
Habermas over the decades had a number of pieces in New Left Review and was the leading figure in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, associated with Adorno, Marcuse and others.
Habermas is known for a range of theories and expositions some of which are covered in Collins obit. His work on the eighteenth century public sphere, where democratic discussion, as he saw it flourished, and its absence in recent times remains in my view of interest.
E P Thompson who saw the Frankfurt School as one with a broader Western Marxism and even Althusser was critical.
He noted in the Poverty of Theory an emphasis on ideological domination ‘which destroys every space for the initiative or creativity of the mass of the people- a domination from which only the enlightened minority of intellectuals can struggle free.
Thompson argued this led to the ‘intellectual’s disinclination to extend himself in practical political activity’
Habermas did make political interventions mostly until recent times on the left but was not associated with political organisation.
Collins ‘New Labour’ Habermas has some politics but not Habermas’s politics, problematic as they were for the left.
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