I first read Jürgen Habermas in a graduate school seminar—The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere—and I felt immense irritation. All this is just wrong! There’s all sorts of Marxist bibble-babble here and he doesn’t have his history right. Hmm, I could write an article correcting what he gets wrong. And a book … and some large portion of my professional career as a historian has ended up as an attempt to redo the history that I think Habermas got wrong, and thereby to revise the political goals that he sets for the present and the future. Irritation made me an epigone.

Reading about Habermas the man, I came to feel greater sympathy for him—to like him for his fundamental decency. Yes, he was a Marxist. But consider where he came from: born with a cleft palate to grow up in Hitler’s Germany, and, in a slightly different world, he could have been swept up in Aktion T4 and killed or sterilized by the Nazis along with so many other handicapped people. After 1945, he listened on the radio to the revelation of the horrors committed by the Nazi regime—and realized how few of his neighbors, friends, or family were willing to acknowledge what had been done by them and in their name. I wish Habermas had not become a Marxist, but he had much worthy of rebelling against in Germany after 1945.

And he did become a Marxist with a difference. Most famously, in the late 1960s, he referred to student radicals as “left Fascists”—and even if he later havered about that characterization, he ultimately saw the illiberalism of the radical left for what it was, and parted ways with it. He was a Marxist who was also attached to the procedures of liberal democracy—an equivalent of the conservative wing of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, of all the men of the left who ultimately wanted to work by law rather than impose by violence and revolution. He respected religion rather than rejecting it with the village-atheist bigotry of so much of the modern left. And his intellectual project rejected the gloomy conclusions of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, glum Marxists, by finding enduring hope in the ideals of the Enlightenment.

Habermas, famously, was the last man of the Enlightenment. He came up with justifications for this, but ultimately, this was a somewhat arbitrary choice. Habermas made much of the historical situatedness of philosophy—in this, a good student of the more conservative Hans-Georg Gadamer—but he took the Enlightenment ideals to have “transhistorical” value. Which, look closely, meant that Habermas liked them, and he then wrote several thousand pages of dense sociology and philosophy to justify his preference. Enlightenment ideals allow for a dictatorship of reason—Robespierre, Lenin—hence my initial irritation with Habermas, for not seeing this clearly enough. But Habermas’s great rival was Michel Foucault, taken by his pullulating disciples as the prophet of unreasoning exercise of power, and Habermas’s championing of the Enlightenment has become ever more attractive as the modern academy plunged headlong into Foucaultian worship of thuggery. Reason may stumble badly, but the sleep of reason produces monsters.

And Habermas looked westward to England and America for what was most innovative in his thought, not east to Moscow. He read the English philosophers of language, such as J. L. Austin, and the American sociologists, such as Talcott Parsons. He read John Dewey, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin. He championed, in his political interventions, a concept of civic nationalism and attachment to the European Union as a way to tie Germany to its Western neighbors. Within the German intellectual and political context, he was a committed Atlanticist. To American readers, Habermas was very German; to Germans, he opened the intellectual world to England and America. He was a man of the West, a West that embraced Germany, and for this, he should be honored.

Habermas did write impenetrably even for a German academic. He also rejected German nationalism to an excessive degree, along with effective policies to regulate immigration to Europe. Oh, and a host of other wrongheaded political judgments. But good ones too: he hesitantly supported the First Gulf War. There is much to criticize about Habermas’s politics and literary style. His failings are not what he deserves to be remembered for.

I have not discussed the substance of Habermas’s thought. It is ferociously dense, and I probably would mischaracterize those parts of it that I think I understand. What mattered for me was the basic insight that the ways we communicate with one another have changed during history (talking, writing, print, electronic media) and these have an important relationship with the sort of government we have and the sort of political ideals we champion. Habermas’s own preferred theory of communicative rationality, meant to solve the assumed problem of instrumental rationality, implied a preferred means of communication that would lead to a rather left-leaning polity. The Achilles heel of his theory—say I—is that while he claimed that his vast theorizing is historically situated, he actually used an out-of-date intellectual history—pre-1933 German scholarship, significantly even pre-1914 scholarship, the sort you might find in a dusty university library in Germany in the 1950s, when Habermas was first getting his sense of the world. Habermas was enormously well-read in sociology and philosophy, but he just wasn’t a historian. If you revise his theory to take account of a continuing joint tradition of conversation and prudence, from the ancient world to the Enlightenment, you come up with a significantly different—more conservative!—set of coordinates for modern politics.

This is what mattered about Habermas’s thought for me. Thousands of scholars have seized on different aspects of Habermas’s work. I can mock professorial excitement as gleefully as the next man. But their excitement, their affection, and their own mass of work building upon his insights is a true, great, and enduring tribute to Habermas’s quality.

Jürgen Habermas deserves to be on German banknotes—and if it is only the German version of the Euro, he wouldn’t mind that blending of Germany and the broader West. He was a great scholar and a great public intellectual. He was a thoughtful man and, more importantly, a decent one. Requiescat in pace.

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