I learned of Jurgen Habermas’s death at 96 while I was teaching my Negotiation intensive course and my students were engaged in a complex multi-party consensus – building exercise. As we debriefed, I asked if they had heard of Habermas and all said No, despite the fact that many were Political Science majors in college.  I then did a 20 minute lecture on his importance as the most significant theorist of deliberative democracy, which inspired Larry Susskind, me and many others to develop, teach and practice the elements of consensus building and deliberative democracy—“scaling up” our work in negotiation and mediation (see many of my own articles,  The Role of the Lawyer in Deliberative Democracy (UNLV L, Rev.; Scaling up ADR in Health Care Reform in Duke’s Law & Contemp Problems, and many other places).  I did, in fact, read much of his (yes, Michael, dense academic writing!) work over many decades, and described him as one of the patron saints of the intellectual wing of our field (with Mary Parker Follett, Lon Fuller, John Nash and others (I have written in many places about our intellectual founders).

At the same time, I have criticized his important work on “ideal speech conditions” as being hyper-rational (principle-law) focused in a world which also needs to take account of the necessity of trading, bargaining needs and interests for practical decision making (see also Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict) and also the need to take account of emotions, ethics and yes, even religion in deliberative discourse—that has been the challenge of both my theoretical and practical work- see the chart on page 428 of the third edition of my text (with Andrea and Lela) Negotiation: Processes of Problem Solving, 2021 (also in the articles cited above).  I continue to work on these important issues of how to keep three levels of discourse in the room at the same time—rational-principled, bargaining-trading, and affective (emotional, moral, ethical) in order to do “good” (not perfect) dispute resolution and decision making. It is sad to me that so many of our students don’t understand where our foundational ideas come from—to be engaged with and modified as the world changes around us. In his lifetime Habermas was criticized by the more radical left, but held pretty steadfastly to his more “centrist” (dare I say, hope for moderation) ideas.  All of this seems sadly lacking at the moment. We could all do with a re-read of some of his work.

Habermas was important to me too, as the child of Holocaust survivors—he was in Hitler Youth, as a young man (his father was a member of the Nazi party) and his horror of what happened in WWII and to the German (and Jewish) people helped forged his theories—he changed  as a human being, and created one of the most optimistic theories of human possibility— recrafting Enlightenment hopes for rational discourse and applying it (even if we are currently unsuccessful totally implementing it!). Although national and global efforts at deliberative democracy are not regnant now,  his theories of equal people trying to apply rational argument to persuade each other to reach actual decisions, democratically arrived at, is still being used in consensus building efforts in localities, some state-wide governments and certainly in some other parts of the world.  I am speaking tonight to our local Foreign Policy  Association in Orange County (yes, progressives in California’s OC!!!) so I will share a brief obituary with a hope for more optimistic engagement in our polarized world with people still trying to implement his ideas (the group focuses on bi-partisan dialogue), even if they don’t know who he is.

Jurgen Habermas, RIP…

Carrie MM