After more than seventy years writing and thinking about democracy, capitalism, and the possibility of emancipatory politics, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday, March 14, at age ninety-six. For a generation of political theorists and philosophers, his work was a touchstone. The author of over thirty books, he was interested in fundamental questions about how we ought to live together without domination and exploitation. But much of his writing is today underread and misunderstood.

I read Habermas around when I was twenty years old and an undergraduate studying policy management at Carleton University in Ottawa. Never an especially attentive policy analyst, I preferred spending my time resolving a never-ending existential crisis brought about by my wavering Catholic faith. Right after I graduated from high school I started reading philosophy, without paying all that much attention to its political content. From the very beginning, I was attracted to the most reactionary thinkers. It’s not too much to say I absorbed Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and especially Martin Heidegger like a sponge. They combined a religious intensity with a covert kind of elitism. This alloyed perfectly with my broody angst nurtured by years of dealing with demanding customers as a cashier. Heidegger et al. struck me as visionary thinkers who gave the middle finger to the kind of very polite, very Canadian liberalism my country was and is rightly known for. In another world I probably stuck with them and walked a very sinister path.

Habermas would seem an unlikely philosopher to cure anyone of their attraction to hard-right thinking. His writing is anything but visionary and striking. Abandon all hope of thunder-and-lightning aphorisms and musings like “God is dead!” or “What is the meaning of Being?” Stick around to learn about the Peircean turn to post-metaphysical thinking through a transition to pragmatism and ordinary language philosophy. Never one to have a proper estimate of his abilities at any time, I jumped right into what everyone said was Habermas’s most important and challenging book: the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action. Immediately I thought it was the most boring work of theory I’d ever read. Who the hell did this? What was the point of the endless meandering about Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and just about every other social theorist and sociologist under the sun? Where was the book’s editor? Why couldn’t Habermas just get to the point and explain why ideal speech situations and undistorted communication ought to be the foundation of a good society? How else could I start listing off “thoughtful” reasons why his stodgy democratic procedures were weak sh-t when confronted with the intense spiritual malaise of modernity?