Introduction 11
developed into a broader critique of what the historian Fritz Ringer
famously identified as the antimodern “mandarin” mentality of pre-
1933 German university professors. “Ringer reconstructs the por-
trait of a world which in fact did not disappear, as he believes, in
1933,” Habermas wrote in 1971.^38 In Habermas’s political writings,
the “mandarin mentality” is a term that symbolically condenses
all the authoritarian, irrationalist, or antidemocratic attitudes
against which Habermas defines himself. The threat of reactionary,
“young conservative,” “antimodern,” or “counter-enlightenment”
thought regaining traction in German political culture is never
far from Habermas’s mind. Whether the threat is always as real as
Habermas seems to think is debatable. One critic has written that
Habermas’s political writings are particularly marked by this pre-
occupation: “They are without exception – related to a deep anxi-
ety concerning the continuing influence of the mandarin mentality
on the political culture of the Federal Republic.”^39 But this critique
errs in resorting to metaphors drawn from psychology to ana-
lyze Habermas’s preoccupations: “Habermas’s ‘Four Horsemen’ –
Heidegger, Schmitt, Jünger and Gehlen – appear again and again in
his political writings with such frequency and regularity that one is
tempted to speak in terms of a response to a trauma.”^40 Trauma and
anxiety are concepts unnecessary for decoding the cultural-political
logic of responding to the German mandarins.
Nonetheless, passions do run high concerning Schmitt’s legacy in
particular. Of the conservative mandarins, it is Carl Schmitt whose
legacy still seems most dangerous to Habermas. At a conference on
Schmitt’s thought in Germany in the 1990s, Habermas confronted
one of the participants with intense anger: “Tell me one thing that
Carl Schmitt wrote that my generation failed to address in our cri-
tiques! Name one thing!”^41 Habermas noted in the early 1990s that a
major source of Schmitt’s appeal in the 1950s was that many postwar
(^38) Habermas, “Die Deutsche Mandarine,” Minerva (London) 9:3, 422–8.
Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic
Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press,
1969).
(^39) Max Pensky, “Jürgen Habermas and the Antinomies of the Intellectual,”
Peter Dews, ed., in Habermas: A Critical Reader (O x ford, Engla nd: Black wel l,
1999 ), 221.
(^40) Ibid.
(^41) Author’s conversation with a legal scholar at the Max Planck Institute for
Legal History, Frankfurt am Main, January 2005.