Prof. Irfan Ahmad was a guest on the podcast series “Neutrality Studies”, where he gave a talk titled “The Blind Empire: Why the West Can't See It's Failing So Hard”. The host of the series, Pascal Lottaz, sat down with Prof. Irfan Ahmad, an anthropologist and sociologist from Ibn Haldun University, to critically examine the legacy of Jürgen Habermas, one of Germany's most celebrated public intellectuals, who passed away on March 14, 2026, at the age of 96.
The conversation begins by acknowledging Habermas's enormous influence, not only in Germany but across the world, as a philosopher of public reason, discourse ethics, and cosmopolitanism. However, Professor Ahmad argues that this widely celebrated image deserves serious scrutiny. When Habermas issued a statement after October 7, he refused to characterize the war on Gaza as genocide and, more critically, treated October 7 as if it had no historical context whatsoever, completely erasing decades of Palestinian history and Israeli settler colonialism from his analysis.
Ahmad traces this blind spot back to the Frankfurt School itself. Despite producing landmark critiques of Western reason, such as the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, neither Adorno, Horkheimer, nor Habermas ever placed colonialism and imperialism at the center of their thinking. This, Prof. Ahmad argues, is not an accident but a structural feature of Western Marxism, which has always prioritized a Eurocentric framework over the lived realities of the Global South.
This leads to Prof. Ahmad's central argument: that Habermas should be understood as an “ethnic thinker” rather than a universal one. The universalism Habermas claims is not truly universal because it originates from a single cultural tradition, Western and Christian, without drawing on African, Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu philosophical traditions. True universalism, Prof. Ahmad insists, must come “from everyone” not just be “available to everyone”.
Finally, the conversation highlights a deeper contradiction: Habermas, known as a philosopher of consensus, in practice supported the Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and framed his Israel-Palestine statement in the very language of enmity he claimed to oppose.
The discussion concludes on a nuanced note that Habermas's intellectual contributions remain significant, but they must be read critically, especially by those in the Global South who understand all too well what real colonization means.
