The Making of a ‘58er 29
not do him justice; greater contextualization is necessary to reshape
our understanding of his earliest works.^3
The priority Habermas attached to the legislative branch enables
us to disentangle the three main strands of his synthesis: his attrac-
tion to Abendroth’s work, the utility for him of the Schmitt school,
and his ambivalent response to the Smend school. Picking up the
thread of these debates, Habermas found arguments that oriented
and invigorated him; his engagement in them had two lasting
effects. The first was to reanimate a significant branch of Frankfurt
School tradition – the political and legal theory of the Weimar-
era theoreticians Franz Neumann (1900–54) and Otto Kirchheimer
(1905–65) – a tradition significant for the rapprochement it signified
between Marxist political economy and the liberal constitutionalist
ideal of the Rechtsstaat, or rule of law-based state. Second, by inter-
rogating German legal theory in the 1950s, Habermas joined the
minority within the constitutional law profession who were strug-
gling toward mastery of the Nazi past of their field, a process of
coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) critical to
reconstructing German political culture.
THE POLITICAL THEORY DEFICIT IN WEST GERMANY IN THE 1950S
When Habermas arrived at the Institute for Social Research in
Frankfurt in 1956, he had no special interest in legal theory, nor were
Horkheimer or Adorno equipped to provide him with orientation to
it. Rather, he was working on a grant-funded study of the concept
of ideology.^4 Habermas first came to Adorno’s attention with his
critique of Heidegger in 1953, of which Adorno approved. Having
discovered Marx only in 1953–4, Habermas was beginning a lasting
reorientation of his intellectual habitus from the Geisteswissenschaften
(humanities) to the Sozialwissenschaften (social sciences). Habermas
earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1954 in Bonn with a thesis on
Schelling. His discovery of Heidegger’s Nazi commitments later
that year caused a break and a search for new sources of orienta-
tion. Habermas encountered Marcuse’s pre-1933 writings in 1956;
it is plausible that these helped him to make the transition away
(^3) Ibid.
(^4) Dews, AS (November 1984) 150.