Habermas

Civil Disobedience and Modernity, 1978–1987 139

neoconservatives.^13 We must pause for a moment to identify what
Habermas meant by these terms of art.
With “young conservatives,” Habermas provocatively labeled
the poststructuralism gaining adherents in France – “this line leads
from Bataille via Foucault to Derrida” – and linked it to interwar
German conservative intellectuals who had rejected the Weimar
Republic and modernity more broadly; Habermas elsewhere also
names Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger “young conservatives.”
By the old conservatives’ “premodernism,” he refers to the neo-
Aristotelianism inaugurated by Leo Strauss – a position anterior to
modernity and associated with natural law; in West Germany, ‘58er
Robert Spaemann is an example. With the “neoconservatives,” he
refers to a trans-Atlantic network of intellectuals, many of whom,
like the sociologists Daniel Bell and Irving Horowitz, connected
with Commentary, embraced the term. Their “postmodernism” con-
sisted in their asymmetrical yes and no to modernity; that is, they
embraced modern science insofar as it promoted economic growth
and new technologies but rejected the “explosive contents of cul-
t u ra l moder n it y.”^14 They thus blamed cultural modernity for the
pathologies of social rationalization – confusing cause and effect:

Neoconservatism shifts onto cultural modernism the uncomfort-

able burdens of a more or less successful capitalist moderniza-

tion.... The neoconservative does not uncover the economic and

social causes for the altered attitudes towards work, consumption

and leisure. Consequently he attributes [behaviors such as]... hedo-

nism, the lack of social identification, the lack of obedience, narcis-

sism, the withdrawal from status and achievement competition – to

the domain of “culture.”^15

In a 2005 interview, Habermas reiterated this definition: “What the
early ‘neoconservatism’ in the USA and in Germany designated was
what we in Bayern call ‘lederhosen and high-tech’: antimodernism in
culture... and conservative progressivism (earlier in a bureaucratic
or technocratic version than in the market-liberal version, imported
from the USA, we have today).”^16

(^13) Ibid., 13.
(^14) Ibid.
(^15) Ibid., 7.
(^16) Author’s private correspondence with Habermas, June 7, 2005.