130 Habermas: An intellectual biography
allayed by compensations that conform to the system. Rather these
new conflicts [concern] protecting and restoring endangered ways
of life or of establishing reformed ways of life. In short, these new
conflicts do not flare up around problems of distribution but around
questions concerning the grammar of forms of life.^178
In focusing his critical attention on the “seams between system
and lifeworld” Habermas returned in spirit to the student move-
ment’s “New Sensibility,” the “postmaterial values” it espoused, and
the corresponding legitimacy deficit faced by the Bonn Republic.
Combining the commitment to legality he had found in the extra-
parliamentary opposition’s campaign against the emergency laws
with the legitimacy demanded by the students had proved a difficult
puzzle. Now – in the 1970s – he returned to the tradition of Western
Marxism in which he had always felt most at home, this time trying
to rewrite Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment but
with a determination to shake off the weight of Weber’s one-sided
account of modern society as an “iron cage.” This is where Weber
had led Adorno and Horkheimer astray, he concluded.^179 Habermas’s
reconstruction of Western Marxism thus would involve a sustained
Auseinandersetzung with Weber.
He began an in-depth study of Weber in 1971, although, as
we have seen, he had written on Weber in the early 1960s too.^180
According to the translator of TCA, Habermas sometimes described
his theory of modernity as a “... second attempt to appropriate
Weber in the spirit of Western Marxism.”^181 What made this enter-
prise particularly burdensome was the way in which Weber’s repre-
sentation of law overstated its system-supporting characteristics and
downplayed its rootedness in the lifeworld. Put another way, Weber
characterized law as a mode of domination, useful to both capital-
ism and the state, but independent of morality.
In a section of TCA entitled, “The Rationalization of
Law: Weber’s Diagnosis of the Times,” Habermas wrote, “In
Weber’s theory of rationalization the development of law occu-
pies a place as prominent as it is ambiguous.”^182 Weber dramatized(^178) Ibid., 576.
(^179) For a discussion of the “dead end” of Critical Theory, see McCarthy,
“Translator’s Preface,” xviii-xxi.
(^180) Honneth et al.,“Dialektik,” 216.
(^181) McCarthy, “Translator’s Preface,” xxxiv.
(^182) Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I, 243.