Honneth on Habermas and Adorno

Axel Honneth on the intellectual dialogue between Jürgen Habermas and Theodor W. Adorno: 

"Der normative Eigensinn des Anderen. Habermas im Dialog mit Adorno" (open access)

(Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 74, no. 4, 2026)

This was Axel Honneth’s keynote address at the “International Symposium in Memory of Jürgen Habermas” (Frankfurt am Main, June 19, 2026). A video of the address is available here.

An English translation is available here: "The Normative Individuality of the Other. Habermas in Dialogue with Adorno".

Abstract: In this article, I reconstruct the intellectual dialogue between Jürgen Habermas and Theodor W. Adorno in order to show how deeply Habermas’s work remained shaped by his former teacher. I argue that, although Habermas gradually developed his own theory of communicative reason, he continued to pursue Adorno’s critique of instrumental rationality in a transformed form. Their relationship becomes visible in their shared concern with public communication, social domination, democracy, and the possibility of emancipation. At the same time, I emphasise the tensions between Adorno’s philosophy of nature and Habermas’s postmetaphysical approach. These differences did not lead to a break, but rather sustained an ongoing philosophical dialogue. Habermas’s later reflections on naturalism and human freedom even brought him closer again to questions that had already occupied Adorno. I therefore interpret his work not as a rejection of Adorno, but as an independent continuation of Critical Theory in Adorno’s spirit.