180 Habermas: An intellectual biography
to the Spanish Parliament. Habermas introduced his procedural
paradigm of law as an alternative to the two postwar paradigms
(liberal and social-welfare state), the errors of which were analo-
gous: “Both views are fixated on the question of whether it suffices
to guarantee private autonomy through individual liberties or...
whether [private autonomy]... must be secured by granting welfare
entitlements.”^36 The lecture also tested the metaphor of concreteness
that was so important in BFN: “The proceduralist legal paradigm...
presupposes that the welfare and liberal models of law construe the
realization of rights in overly concrete terms and conceal the inter-
nal relation between private and public autonomy.”^37 The welfare
state “still draws its power” from the utopian idea of liberation from
alienating work, Habermas acknowledged. But he argued that lib-
eration had always been envisioned too “concretistically”; that is,
classical utopias had tried to “paint” too detailed a picture of the
good life.^38 Habermas’s goal was to preserve the spirit of the “utopia
of a workers’ society” (arbeitsgesellschaftliche Utopie) but to transpose
its core values – freedom, equality, and solidarity – into a new, less
concretely pictured framework. Habermas asserted that what made
his utopia unprecedented was that it restricted “itself to the for-
mal aspects of undistorted intersubjectivity.”^39 He explained that
the “ideal speech situation” he had worked out in the 1970s did not
depict a “concrete form of life”: Rather, it only created the necessary
“formal” or “procedural” framework within which the public could
deliberate and collectively fill in the picture of the good society.^40
Through a defined procedural framework, participants themselves
would decide which “concrete possibilities” of social organization
they desired. Only by shifting the utopian accent from work to com-
munication, he wrote, could a new “division of powers” between the
three resources of modern societies – money, power, and solidarity –
be pursued.^41 Habermas’s first formulations of the proceduralist
paradigm, the signature of his mature political thought, were rooted
in this context of being on the political offensive.(^36) Habermas, BFN, 408.
(^37) BFN, 437 (emphasis added).
(^38) Habermas, NR, 195.
(^39) Habermas, “Krise des Wohlfahrtstaates,” 161.
(^40) The concept of the “ideal speech situation” dates back to at least the Gauss
Lectures of 1971. See Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction, 97.
(^41) Habermas, “Krise des Wohlfahrtstaates,” 158.