172 Habermas: An intellectual biography
has either “abandoned” Marx,^2 resigning itself to liberal constitu-
tionalism, or relinquished a utopian horizon. BFN has been said to
mark a turn in Habermas’s work: signifying a final capitulation to
an ascendant neoliberal capitalism,^3 substituting ethics for politics,^4
representing the final abandonment of Critical Theory, or implic-
itly endorsing Western European parliamentary democracy as the
unsurpassable framework of contemporary politics. One political
theorist argues that BFN “... offers at times a surprisingly mod-
erate and even conciliatory picture of ‘real-existing’ democracy...
[It is] an inadequately critical assessment of capitalist democracy.”^5
As Habermas acknowledged, “Even if readers do not always see the
‘end of critical theory’ in this project, they frequently think it defuses
the critique of capitalism and just gives in to political liberalism.”^6
This chapter argues, by contrast, that Habermas’s 1992 work rep-
resents an important restatement of the radical democratic project
of reform to which Habermas has been committed since the 1960s.
In support of this project, Habermas supplies an investigation of
the lessons of German intellectual history – specifically of its legal
theory and jurisprudence.
The inventory Habermas takes in BFN of his own evolution as
a political and legal thinker since the late 1950s permits a reading
of the work as a kind of fragmented intellectual autobiography. The
autobiographical character of Habermas’s mature political testa-
ment reveals how pervasively the traditions of twentieth-century
German legal theory influence his work. Where other scholars have
characterized BFN as a decisive marker of a “legal turn” or “lib-
eral turn” in Habermas’s thought, in fact, no such turn exists.^7 The(^2) Chris Thornhill, Political Theory in Modern Germany (London: Blackwell,
2000), 173.
(^3) See, for example, Chantal Mouffe, “Introduction: Schmitt’s Challenge,” in
The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. C. Mouffe (New York: Verso, 1999 ).
(^4) Slavoj Žižek, “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” in Mouffe,
Challenge.
(^5) See William Scheuerman, “Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic
Theory in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms,” in Habermas: A Critical
Reader, ed. Peter Dews (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1999 ), 155–6.
(^6) Habermas, “Reply to Symposium Participants,” in Cardozo Law Review
17:4–5 (1996), 1545.
(^7) For example, John McCormick writes that Habermas’s BFN “... is some-
thing of a culminating moment in the absorption in recent years by social
democratic political theory of liberal institutional, legal and ethical theory.”
McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 306. Also see Kenneth