174 Habermas: An intellectual biography
history and politics dramatically underscores his significance as the
public philosopher of the Federal Republic of Germany.NEITHER LIBERALISM NOR REPUBLICANISM: THE
PROCEDURAL THEORY OF LAW AND DEMOCRACYThe central tension in modern Western political philosophy, as
Habermas stages it, was the tension between the “freedom of the
ancients,” which he encapsulates with the term “popular sover-
eignty,” and the “freedom of the moderns,” which he denotes by the
concept of “human rights.”^9 While Habermas uses the term “repub-
licanism” to refer to a tradition of thought exemplified by Rousseau
but rooted in Aristotle and the traditions of Renaissance humanism,
he uses modern “liberalism” to refer to a tradition whose exemplars
are Locke and Kant. Elsewhere he emphasizes the parameters of
a “narrow” tradition tracing its roots to Locke: “ ‘Liberals’ such as
Dworkin and Rawls cannot be confined to this tradition.”^10 What is
absent from his explicit definitions, however, is the German histori-
cal experiences congealed and concealed within his characteriza-
tions of the “liberal” and “republican” traditions. That Habermas
understands his procedural theory as an alternative to “liberal”
accounts also reveals his discomfort with the label and affords us
grounds for scepticism about the thesis that BFN is the signature of
a liberal turn in Habermas’s thought.
Habermas’s ideal types are designed to suggest that where repub-
licans tend to prioritize “public autonomy” – or the principle of pop-
ular sovereignty – liberals tend to fear tyrannical majorities and use
human rights to erect barriers to encroachment by the sovereign
will of the people. The problem is that “[o]nce the issue is set up in
this way, either idea can be upheld only at the expense of the other.
The intuitively plausible co-originality of both ideas falls by the
way side.”^11 Habermas argued that his procedural or discourse the-
ory of democracy is the ideal mediator because it “... takes elements9 Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in idem, The Inclusion
of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, eds. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De
Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998 ), 258; orig. Die Einbeziehung des
Anderen. Studien zur politischen Theorie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996 ).(^10) Habermas, BFN, 549, note 10.
(^11) Habermas, “Normative Models,” 258.