The Making of a ‘58er 31
recovered the neglected and misunderstood tradition represented
by Neumann and Kirchheimer.^13 But in 1956, the Institute’s inter-
war publication, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, in which Neumann
and Kirchheimer had written many of their most important works,
was kept in the Institute basement. “Horkheimer was terribly afraid
of us opening the chest in the basement that contained a complete
series of the journal,” Habermas recalled.^14 Horkheimer was con-
cerned about the radicalism of the Zeitschrift and sought to contain
its influence on the postwar reputation of the Institute.
As important as this tradition is to a full historical picture of
the Frankfurt School, neither Neumann nor Kirchheimer was the
most important influence on Habermas’s emerging political theory.
This was due, in part, to the fact that when Habermas composed
Transformation, there was no “stimulus from the history of ideas”
that might have encouraged Habermas to focus on the political
sociology of democracy:
Not merely Kirchheimer’s trenchant studies from the late 1920s
and early 1930s but also all the discussion by social democratic and
trade union–oriented legal and constitutional experts, both among
themselves and with their authoritarian counterparts, formed part
of a tradition of social democratic thought that had been either
destroyed or protractedly interrupted by Nazism and remained
suppressed until late in the 1960s. In... [West Germany], this tra-
dition was only maintained by Wolfgang Abendroth. Habermas –
and even more so others of his generation – knew only more recent
work by Kirchheimer, Neumann and Fraenkel.^15
In the summer of 1957 , Habermas’s assignment to an empirical
research project led him into the field of legal theory and its Weimar
roots for the first time. Student und Politik (Students and Politics), a
Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen
Arbeiterbewegung 25 (Berlin, 1989), 1–30.(^13) See William Scheuerman, Between the Norm and Exception: The Frankfurt School
and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 ); idem, “Neumann vs.
Habermas: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law,” Praxis International 13
( 1993 ): 50–67; idem, ed. The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Neumann
and Kirchheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996 ).
(^14) Cited in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 544; Honneth et al.,“Dialektik,”
169.
(^15) Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 559.