182 Habermas: An intellectual biography
but also refer to the West German left, which he had urged since
the late 1960s to identify more with the constitution. With his idea
of the democratic constitutional state as an “unfinished project,”
Habermas tried to reorient the goals of the German left.
His key maneuver was to break down the antinomy of
“constitution” and “revolution” by arguing that constitutions are
“self-revolutionizing” entities. For Habermas, being a leftist “loyal
to the constitution”^46 meant rejecting the claim that the “orienting
power” of the French Revolution was exhausted. The single most
important legacy of the French Revolution for Habermas was the
constitutional state because in it the utopian core of “revolution” –
the universally valid ideas of democracy and human rights – was pre-
served.^47 In contrast to nearly all of his critics, Habermas saw (and
still sees) himself as part of a Marxian tradition of social theory that
seeks to preserve such key Marxist-humanist ideals as solidarity and
liberation from coercion by reconstructing them.^48 This thought
is evident in his chapter on contemporary Marxist theory in The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which he explains that retriev-
ing the “normative content” of modernity means moving away from
the “... concepts of praxis philosophy if not its intentions”:^49
I’ve quite fiercely decided to defend [social theory in the Marxian
tradition]... as a still meaningful enterprise;... I do think that I
have been a reformist all my life, and maybe I have become a bit
more so in recent years. Nevertheless, I mostly feel I am the last
Marxist.^50
Whether or not Habermas can be categorized as a Marxist, if an
extremely unorthodox one, need not detain us here. The point is
that Habermas’s mature work can hardly be characterized as a doc-
ument of political resignation. In BFN, Habermas imagines a con-
stitutionalism capacious enough to absorb the full force and breadth
of the French revolutionary project.
What is significant about these formulations is that Habermas was
arguing that that no Verfassungspatriotismus (patriotism centered on(^46) Author’s private correspondence with Habermas, June 7, 2005.
(^47) Habermas, BFN, 465.
(^48) Habermas, “Excursus on Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution,”
in PDM, 347.
(^49) Ibid. He is using “praxis philosophy” as a synonym for Western Marxism.
(^50) Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” [1992] 464, 469.