162 Habermas: An intellectual biography
thought: “ Unjust law is that which has fallen out of harmony with
the moral law. An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in
the perpetual and in the natural law.”^120 Kriele’s argument was one
factor driving Habermas to define civil disobedience in terms other
than natural law. The rhetorical strategies of the peace movement
must have appeared to blur the key boundary between public and
private morality: “Any action based on some or other private moral-
ity [Privatmoral], a special right [Sonderrecht ] or a privileged access
to truth” forfeits its claim to legitimacy, Habermas argued.^121
One suspects that Habermas’s argument was prompted by a
strong tendency in the rhetoric of the peace movement to coun-
terpose women’s supposedly superior capacity for peace-making to
the inherently belligerent propensities of men. As one historian of
the movement has written: “This sense of women’s special mystical
powers, of which however it seems men could sometimes partake –
was crucial to the peace coalition that brought millions together.”^122
Similarly, militarism was anatomized as a form of “male madness”
and counterposed to the higher rationality of women’s fear. Women’s
“... greater emotional capacity and awareness (for many but not all,
a function of their ability to bear children)” ostensibly made them
better judges of the threat posed by the nuclear arms race. Green
Party leader Petra Kelly, for example, “... averred that overween-
ing power of technology could only be counteracted by embrace of
nature and God: by ‘reconciling with oneself with the cosmos’, an
act she associated most closely with women.”^123 Habermas may well
have categorized this argument as a privileged claim to truth.
Alternatively, Habermas may have decided that the political
price for purchasing a new constitutional right was too high or the
rhetoric too histrionic. Activist Dorothée Sölle equated German
“slavery” to U.S. foreign policy with African-American slavery.^124
Helmut Simon similarly had argued at an Evangelical Church con-
ference in Hannover that the moral unacceptability of the use of(^120) Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a
Dream.” Atlanta: Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1963.
(^121) Habermas, “Testfall,” 36–7.
(^122) Belinda Davis, “The Gender of War and Peace: Rhetoric in the West
German Peace Movement of the Early 1980s,” Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts
für Soziale Bewegungen (Special Issue, “Peace Movements As Social
Movements”) 32 (Dec. 2004), 103.
(^123) Davis,“Gender of War,” 126.
(^124) Ibid., 129.