Politics & Power Quote by Jurgen Habermas

Habermas draws a hard line with the calm severity of someone who’s watched that line get blurred for political convenience. “Familiar territory” does a lot of work: partisans operate within a recognizable political landscape - a state, a populace, a contest over governance - even if they violate laws or norms. Their violence (or coercion) is legible as politics, tethered to constituencies, institutions, and an endgame that can, in principle, be negotiated. “Professed political objectives” sounds almost grudging, as if he’s conceding that even ugly movements tend to justify themselves in the public idiom of power, rights, liberation, or order.

The subtext is a warning about category drift. Call your enemy “terrorists” and you don’t just describe them; you strip them of political status, foreclose dialogue, and license exceptional measures. Habermas, the theorist of the public sphere and communicative reason, is sensitive to how language can evacuate the possibility of political resolution. “To conquer power” frames partisan struggle as instrumental and public-facing: power is the stake, not pure spectacle. Terrorism, by contrast, is implied to be strategic violence aimed at destabilizing the conditions of politics itself - leveraging fear, ambiguity, and civilian vulnerability to short-circuit deliberation.

Context matters: postwar Germany, RAF-era domestic terror, and the post-9/11 temptation to collapse insurgency, resistance, and terror into one moralized bucket. Habermas isn’t romanticizing partisans; he’s defending the analytical and democratic necessity of distinguishing enemies who still speak the language of politics from those who weaponize its breakdown. The point is less moral than civic: democracies rot fastest when they can’t name conflict accurately.