156 Habermas: An intellectual biography
moral foundations and political culture of a developed democratic
com mu n it y.”^87 Given Habermas’s contemporaneous call to com-
plete the “project of modernity,” the clear implication is that statist
German jurisprudence stood in the way of completing Germany’s
modernity. This conjuncture in German politics was both a crisis
and an opportunity for Germany to mature:
As the comparison with the student movement teaches, the present
movement gives us the first chance, even in Germany, to grasp civil
disobedience as an element of a ripe political culture.^88
The practice gives the German public, for the first time, the chance
to liberate itself from a paralyzing trauma and to look without fear
on the previously taboo question of the formation of a radical dem-
ocratic consciousness. The danger is that this chance – which other
countries with a longer democratic tradition... have integrated produc-
tively – will be passed up.^89
It was no accident that Habermas invested in the practice of civil
disobedience his hope for an epochal maturation of German public
life. On January 30, 1983, Germans were confronted with the fif-
tieth anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power. Anniversaries in the
Federal Republic were an important occasion for the construction
and reconstruction of public memory. Getting the concept of “resis-
tance” right in 1983 thus meant preventing misuses of the legacy
of the resistance shown by the plotters of July 20, 1944, and the
members of the White Rose. Understanding what distinguished
civil disobedience from resistance meant being able to grasp what
distinguished the “halfway functioning constitutional state” in
Bonn from Hitler’s tyranny.^90 Inflating dissent and symbolic protest
into resistance seemed to devalue the wartime acts of resistance and
risked incurring disproportionate repression by the state.
Civil disobedience differed from resistance in three ways,
Habermas explained: It did not challenge the entire legal order,
it appealed to the “legal sensibility” of the majority, and it made
this appeal in the name of explicit constitutional values. Habermas(^87) Habermas, “Testfall,” 43.
(^88) Ibid., 32.
(^89) Habermas, “Recht und Gewalt,” 101; “Right and Violence,” 126 (emphasis
added).
(^90) The phrase is Habermas’s own. See Habermas, “Introduction,” Spiritual
Situation of the Age, 11 (orig. at Kleine Politische Schriften I-IV, 411–41).