A City of Contradictions and Intellectual Openness

Frankfurt am Main is not a city that reveals its charms to the casual visitor. It demands residence, patience, and engagement to appreciate its unique character. A place where conflicts play out openly, diverse populations converge, and ideas collide without pretense, Frankfurt gradually wins over those who call it home. The city possesses a distinctive, recognizable personality—a serious, unadorned intellectuality that embraces both the allure and dissonance of modernity. This urban environment, with its tension between tradition and progress, commerce and culture, became the perfect backdrop for one of the twentieth century’s most significant philosophical homecomings.

The Intellectual Homecoming

After enduring disputes at the Starnberg Institute and experiencing public humiliation twice at the University of Munich, Jürgen Habermas found himself drawn back to what he considered his intellectual home. Resigning from the Max Planck Institute, he submitted applications to both Bielefeld University and Frankfurt University. While other institutions expressed interest—including Göttingen University through philosopher Günther Patzig and the Institute for Social Research through its director Gerhard Brandt—Habermas ultimately focused on Frankfurt. The city had already signaled its appreciation in September 1980 when the municipal board decided to award him the Theodor W. Adorno Prize, established just three years earlier with Norbert Elias as its first recipient.

The award ceremony on September 11, 1980, in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche represented more than mere academic recognition. In his address, Christian Democratic Union mayor Walter Wallmann paid tribute to Habermas’s controversial philosophical works while explicitly defending the Frankfurt School against accusations that it had paved the ideological way for 1970s terrorism. This political endorsement from a conservative mayor signaled the complex intellectual landscape Habermas would re-enter.

Distinguishing Philosophical Traditions

Philosopher Michael Theunissen’s award presentation drew careful distinctions between Adorno’s negative dialectics and Habermas’s normative dialectics. He noted that while Adorno’s influence permeated Habermas’s work, the latter had developed his own distinctive approach. Both intellectuals remained open to “all that lives and breathes,” extending beyond science and philosophy, but their philosophical language games revealed different cultural traditions and methodologies. Theunissen particularly highlighted Habermas’s crucial insight that “technical-instrumental knowledge does not necessarily mean progress in practical consciousness”—a foundational concept that would shape Habermas’s subsequent work.

The Modernity Manifesto

Habermas’s acceptance speech, published on September 19, 1980, in Die Zeit under the programmatic title “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” marked a turning point in his philosophical development. This address would eventually expand into his landmark work “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.” In it, he launched a vigorous critique of what he termed “the critique of modernism,” particularly targeting the rising tide of post-modernist thought.

He developed a tripartite classification of conservative responses to modernity. The “young conservatives,” including Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida , were anti-modernists who championed “the spontaneous forces of the imagination, self-experience, and emotion” reaching back to archaic periods. The “old conservatives” advocated returning to pre-modern positions. Most significantly, Habermas identified “neo-conservatives” like the early Wittgenstein, Carl Schmitt, and late Gottfried Benn, who argued that science should not guide the lifeworld, politics should avoid moral-practical justification, and art should be limited to individual cultivation.

Continuing the Modernist Project

In direct continuity with Adorno’s critique of modernity, Habermas argued for persisting with the reflexive modernization project. He maintained that only through examining modernity’s “aporiae” and understanding why it remained incomplete could the modernist project be brought to fruition. This position positioned him uniquely between uncritical celebration of progress and outright rejection of Enlightenment values.

His Paulskirche address also reflected the changing political landscape of 1980s West Germany. Following the October 1980 federal election, Helmut Schmidt became chancellor of an SPD-FDP coalition government. Schmidt, who had advised his colleagues to read both Marx and Popper, lasted only two years in office. His government’s turn toward technocratic governance sparked numerous left-wing movements protesting military expansion, urban real estate speculation, nuclear power, and major projects like Frankfurt Airport expansion.

Social Movements and Political Engagement

Habermas found himself largely aligned with the political aims of these new social movements, yet his Paulskirche speech concluded with cautious criticism of their approach. While sharing their concerns about technocratic governance and environmental issues, he questioned whether these movements adequately addressed the broader philosophical questions surrounding modernity’s unfinished project.

This tension between philosophical principle and political practice would characterize much of Habermas’s work during his third period in Frankfurt. His return to the city represented not just an academic appointment but a homecoming to the intellectual tradition that had shaped him—the Frankfurt School critical theory that had evolved from Horkheimer and Adorno’s original Institute for Social Research.

The Frankfurt School Legacy

The Frankfurt School’s intellectual journey mirrored the city’s complex relationship with modernity. Founded in 1923, the Institute for Social Research had developed critical theory as a response to the failures of both orthodox Marxism and liberal capitalism. Forced into American exile during the Nazi era, key figures returned to Germany after the war, though Adorno and Horkheimer had reestablished the institute in Frankfurt rather than returning to its original Columbia University affiliation.

Habermas belonged to the second generation of this tradition, having studied with Adorno and worked as his assistant in the 1950s. His return to Frankfurt in 1983 thus represented a philosophical homecoming to the institution that had shaped his early career, albeit with significant developments in his own thinking that distinguished him from his mentors.

The University as Intellectual Space

Frankfurt University provided the institutional framework for Habermas’s continued work on modernity. His position as philosophy professor allowed him to develop his theories of communicative action and discourse ethics while engaging with both supporters and critics. The university’s atmosphere of open intellectual conflict—so characteristic of Frankfurt itself—proved fertile ground for developing his ideas about how rational communication could address modernity’s unfinished project.

During this period, Habermas worked extensively on what would become his two-volume “Theory of Communicative Action” , developing his concepts of system and lifeworld and analyzing how communicative rationality could counter the instrumental rationality that dominated modern societies. His return to Frankfurt thus coincided with one of his most productive philosophical periods.

Cultural Impact and Public Intellectual Role

Habermas’s third Frankfurt period solidified his role as a public intellectual engaged with pressing social and political issues. His work reached beyond academic circles through newspaper articles, public lectures, and engagements with social movements. The modernity speech itself exemplified this public philosophy, appearing first in a major newspaper before being developed into a book.

His critique of postmodernism influenced intellectual debates across Europe and North America, while his defense of Enlightenment values against both conservative and radical critiques positioned him as a distinctive voice in 1980s intellectual life. The Frankfurt environment—with its combination of financial power and intellectual tradition—provided the perfect stage for this public philosophical role.

Legacy and Contemporary Relevance

Habermas’s third return to Frankfurt represents more than a biographical detail; it symbolizes the ongoing relevance of critical theory and the unfinished project of modernity. His work during this period continues to influence debates about democracy, rationality, and social evolution in an increasingly complex global environment.

The modernity concept he developed in Frankfurt remains particularly relevant in addressing contemporary challenges like digital communication, ecological crisis, and global inequality. His insistence that modernity represents an unfinished project rather than a failed or completed one offers a constructive alternative to both uncritical progress narratives and pessimistic declarations of postmodern fragmentation.

Frankfurt itself continues to embody the tensions Habermas analyzed—between global finance and local culture, between tradition and innovation, between conflict and consensus. The city’s development since the 1980s has only intensified these modern contradictions, making it an ongoing case study for the theories Habermas developed during his third residence there.

The intellectual spirit that Habermas found in Frankfurt—serious, unadorned, and open to tension—continues to characterize both the city and the philosophical tradition it fostered. His work remains a testament to the possibility of engaged critical thinking that neither retreats into nostalgia nor surrenders to fragmentation, but persists with the difficult project of modernity through reasoned discourse and democratic engagement.