A renewed focus on the great insight that drove his thinking would be an appropriate legacy. The Theory of Communicative Action, his 1980s magnum opus, was not (to put it mildly) as accessible as some of his newspaper opinion pieces. But its central idea – that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are – remains an antidote both to intellectual relativism and Trumpian “realism”, which elevates national or individual self-interest above all other sources of human motivation.