Recasting Democratic Theory, 1984–1996 173
thesis of a legal or liberal turn obscures a significant continuity in
Habermas’s work, namely, his political analysis since publication
of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) has been
framed in the language of German legal theory. This reading of
BFN thus is in accord with this broad feature of Habermas’s own
self-understanding as a radical reformer. Habermas’s emplotment
of German intellectual history as a series of dead ends helps him to
legitimate his procedural (or discourse) theory of politics and law as
the best remaining option for a progressive left after the Cold War’s
end. Both introspective and strategic, Habermas’s BFN constructs a
usable past for his distinct political project.
While BFN has been thoroughly appraised by scholars of consti-
tutional law and political philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic,
it has not been considered historically.^8 Much of the scholarship
takes its cue from Habermas’s hope that he would contribute to the
resolution of the “liberalism-communitarianism” debate in Atlantic
political theory. However, this academic conversation was a far less
significant context informing the work than the dynamic shifts in
postwar German political culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Habermas
first sketched his mature political project in a 1984 lecture on what
he called the “exhaustion of utopian energies” in Western European
politics. In 1989–90, he aligned himself with the progressive wing
of the jurists in the constitutional debates of the years 1989–90, who
hoped a new constitution-giving assembly would serve to “refound”
the republic. But Habermas was highly ambivalent about German
reunification. His ambivalence offers a new perspective on the ten-
sion between the liberal and republican dimensions in his thought.
For all his celebrated bridge-building between Continental and
Anglo-American social and political thought, therefore, BFN is pro-
foundly rooted in German intellectual traditions and its tumultuous
political landscape. Situating Habermas this way recasts the meaning
of his career: Reading BFN as his summa of the problems of German
Baynes, “Democracy and Rechtsstaat: Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Steven White (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ), 201.(^8) There are only two exceptions: Matŭstìk, Profile, 202–18, and Dick Howard,
“Law and Political Culture,” Cardozo Law Review 17:4–5 ( 1996 ): 1391–1430.
For a representative overview of the reception of BFN by political philos-
ophers and constitutional lawyers, see Discourse and Democracy: Essays on
Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, eds. Kenneth Baynes and René von
Schomberg (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002 ).