96 Habermas: An intellectual biography
man ‘rules’, because it functions.... [T]he statesman is not at all ‘deci-
sion-maker’ or ‘ruler’ but rather analyst, planner, executor. Politics
in the sense of normative will-formation falls in principle outside
of these realms.”^27 For Carl Schmitt’s famous epigram – “Sovereign
is he who decides on the exception” – Schelsky substituted his own
bulkier version: “Sovereign may be called whoever in a given soci-
ety achieves highest efficiency in the application of scientific and
technological measures.”^28 Schelsky was arguing that under mod-
ern technical conditions, the idea of democracy had lost its “classi-
cal” substance. Deliberation was made unnecessary by the objective
exigencies of the facts. Schelsky’s key concept – “Sachgesetzlichkeit”
(the law-giving power of things) – vividly encapsulates the “level-
ing,” as it were, of empirical and normative levels of analysis in his
thought.^29
Schelsky’s thought strongly reflects the influence of his teachers,
Arnold Gehlen and Hans Freyer (1887–1969). Gehlen and Freyer
were representative of the “conservative revolution” of Weimar
Republic intellectuals who counterposed power, vitality, and action
(“the deed”) to the decadence of Western civilization in general and
German parliamentarism in particular.^30 G eh len was a par t-t ime col-
league of Forsthoff’s at the University of Königsberg in the 1930s and
was influenced by a concept, “Daseinsvorsorge” (roughly, welfare pro-
vision), that Forsthoff had introduced in the Third Reich in 1938.^31
Forsthoff, Gehlen, and Schelsky emphasized the ways in which eco-
nomic growth and technical progress could mitigate class struggle,
and their ideas were popularized in books published in 1965.^32 The(^27) Ibid., 456.
(^28) Ibid., 455.
(^29) Schelsky’s prominence as a public intellectual began with the dissemination
of his thesis that West Germany was a “levelled, middle-class society,” for
which a Marxist class-politics was ill-suited. Schelsky, Der Mensch in der wis-
senschaftlichen Zivilisation (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag 1961 ).
(^30) See Jerry Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization
of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987 ).
Der Tat (The Deed) was the title of the movement’s most significant journal.
(^31) Dirk Van Laak, “From the Conservative Revolution to Technocratic
Conservatism,” in Werner-Müller, German Ideologies since 1945, 141.
“Daseinsvorsorge” comes from Ernst Forsthoff, Die Verwaltung als
Leistungsträger (Stuttgart/Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1938).
(^32) Ibid.,155. Wilhelm Fucks’s Formulas for Power was a bestseller in 1965; intel-
lectual publicist Rüdiger Altmann’s concept of the “formed society” (formi-
erte Gesellschaft) made its way into the speeches of Ludwig Erhard in 1965.