176 Habermas: An intellectual biography
“formal,” turn was the sole means for salvaging the content of utopia
from its twentieth-century embodiments. Proceduralism was the
best alternative to overly “concrete” political ideologies. State social-
ism, Western European social democracy, and Western European
liberalism all were “too concrete.” The problem with Marx and
Engels’s thought, for example, was that... they read Rousseau and Hegel too much through the eyes of
Aristotle.... [T]heir idea of a liberated society was too concrete.
They conceived socialism as a historically privileged form of con
crete ethical life [Sittlichkeit]... [rather than as] the set of necessary
conditions for emancipated forms of life about which participants
themselves would have to reach an understanding.^19
To mark the distinction between discredited past utopias and the
possibility of future ones, Habermas used different words: “Entwurf”
and “Projekt.”
After the collapse of state socialism and the end of the “global civil
war,” the theoretical error of the defeated party is there for all to
see: it mistook the socialist project [Projekt] for the design [Entwurf]
- and violent implementation – of a concrete form of life.^20
Borrowing from contemporary German legal theorists such as
Ulrich Preuss, Habermas offered an alternative to the traditional
socialist utopia: the image of the constitution as ongoing and infi-
nitely revisable learning process. “If a utopia is equivalent to the
ideal projection [Entwurf] of a concrete form of life, then the con-
stitution taken as a project [Projekt] is neither a social utopia nor a
substitute for such.”^21 The German constitution was an unfinished
project: It opened a discussion rather than finishing the design of
the good society once and for all.
Since the mid-1980s, Habermas has more than once described
the arc of his intellectual development since the late 1950s as a move-
ment away from the “holism” and “cryptonormativism” of Western
Marxism:
You know that I grew up in the tradition of what Merleau-Ponty
named “Western Marxism.”... I have tried to free myself from the
(^19) Habermas, BFN, 478 (emphasis added).
(^20) Ibid., xvi (emphasis added).
(^21) Ibid., 444–5.