24 Habermas: An intellectual biography
higher “natural law,” and the third concerned the interpretation of
the basic rights section of the constitution.
Chapter 3 examines the evolution of Habermas’s thought
between 1961 and 1981 , with a focus on the critical years 1964–9.
It argues that the groundwork for one of his masterworks, The
Theory of Communicative Action (1981), was laid before 1968, a fact
with significant implications for how his career is understood as
a whole. The positions Habermas took between 1964 and 1969
responded to a pervasive discourse on “technocracy,” or rule
by experts, in which all political tendencies in West German
society from the far left to the conservative right participated.
Contextualizing Habermas as a participant in this debate helps to
explain why Habermas accepted the radical left-wing students’ cri-
tique of the university but rejected their broader hostility toward
modern science and technology. Faced with visions of technologi-
cal utopia on both the left (e.g., Herbert Marcuse) and the right
(e.g., Schelsky), Habermas inquired into the relationship of scien-
tific expertise to political practice thematized by Max Weber. His
turn to Weber helped Habermas to recognize what was wrong with
both the German university structures and the student opposi-
tion: Both missed the connection between legality and legitimacy.
While student protestors undervalued legality, the technocratic
conservatives declared democratic legitimation of policy choices
obsolete. The political crises of the late 1960s were the theater
in which Habermas began to work out his mature solution to the
question of how to combine legality with legitimacy.
The argument of Chapter 4 is that Habermas’s three major theo-
retical positions in the 1980s – the theory of modernity, the concept
of constitutional patriotism, and his advocacy of civil disobedience
in the face of West German nuclear armament – have a remarkable
coherence that has been overlooked. Each position represents an
interlocking piece of an answer to a pressing political question: What
was the nature of West Germany’s link to the West? Was it based
on strategic interests or moral values? The political crisis engen-
dered by the public debate on the stationing of intermediate-range
nuclear missiles in 1980–3 caused a major realignment of the gov-
erning coalition and presented strategic challenges to Habermas as
a political thinker. The chapter traces Habermas’s rejection of the
positions of both the neoconservatives around Helmut Kohl and
the neutralist (anti-NATO) left around Oskar Lafontaine and his