59

Four major themes in Habermas’s writings from 1958 to 1963 reveal
the influence of the debates and contexts discussed in Chapter 1. The
first concerns the plebiscitary deformation of democracy; the other
three concern the status of liberal constitutionalism. Habermas’s
investigation of the first issue seems to have led him in search of
a normative theory of the political, something he did not find in
American political science. On this point, German constitutional
theory seized Habermas’s interest, despite it being dominated by the
statist approach – a fact that does not attest to a fundamental illib-
eralism in Habermas’s early writings.^1 The repression of the Nazi
past by the Smend school had the not-incidental effect of repressing
the Social Democratic–republican tradition in legal theory. Indeed,
the ideas of Sinzheimer, Kirchheimer, and Fraenkel did not resur-
face in West Germany until 1965,^2 and Heller’s work resurfaced
only in 1968, when a “... new generation sought a socially liberal,
social-scientifically oriented and politically unreproachable author to
reference.”^3 I n c o nt e x t , t h e r e f o r e , w e c a n i nt e r p r e t H a b e r m a s ’s a p p r o-
priation of conservative constitutional theory as a result of a historical
lacuna. As Habermas wrote in response to a question about the
influence of some of the leading contemporary German political sci-
entists (for example, Hennis, Sontheimer, Sternberger) on his work:

It is true that I was very much influenced in the late ‘50s by the

W e i m a r Staatsrechtslehrerdiskussion and its aftermath (C. Schmitt,

Forsthoff, Weber vs. Abendroth), but less so by Kirchheimer,

2

Habermas as Synthesizer of German

Constitutional Theory, 1958–1963

(^1) Schlink, “Why Carl Schmitt?” 435.
(^2) Walther, R adbr uch-These, 353.
(^3) Michael Stolleis,“Der Methodenstreit der Weimarer Staatsrechtslehrer – ein
abgeschlossene Kapitel der Wissenschaftsgeschichte?” Sitzungsberichte der
Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der J.W.-Goethe Universität, Frankfurt/
Main, 39:1 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001), 19.