60 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Fraenkel and Neumann.... I hadn’t read much of [the] contem-
porary stuff in the field of political science and theory (except the
American literature on mass communication and political sociol-
ogy – Kornhauser, Lipset, C.W. Mills, etc.). Until I discovered
Rawls in the late ‘70s I was nourished in political theory almost
only by the German Staatsrechtslehre.^4
Viewed contextually, Habermas’s early writings are a daring –
even jarring – hybrid of existing discourses. Habermas’s interdisci-
plinary reach seems to have been driven by the peculiarities of the
West German intellectual field, which was structured by an empiri-
cal and positivist political science on the one hand, and a conserva-
tive statist constitutional theory on the other. What was missing
was a combined Critical Theory of politics, the state, and law with
a strong normative perspective. As Habermas stated in the preface
to Transformation:
The public sphere... [is an] object whose complexity precludes
exclusive reliance on the methods of a single discipline.... [T]he
category “public sphere” must be investigated within the broad field
formerly reflected in the perspective of the science of “politics”
[Politik]. When considered within the boundaries of a particular
social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates.^5
Along the same lines, Habermas added that the “... object that
public-opinion research was to apprehend has dissolved into some-
thing elusive”^6 ; it “[leads] the life of a recluse not quite taken seri-
ously by sociologists: precisely as a fiction of constitutional law.”^7
However, because public opinion was not an explicit legal norm, it
was not important to the jurists either. As Habermas’s contempo-
rary, Wilhelm Hennis, wrote in 1956 , “The problems which the rise(^4) Author’s private correspondence with Habermas, October 24, 2008.
Habermas is referring to William Kornhauser, author of The Politics of
Mass Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959 ), and Seymour Martin Lipset,
author of Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday,
1960 ).
(^5) Habermas, “Vorwort zur ersten Auflage,” Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit:
Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Mit einem
Vorwort zur Neuauflage 1990 [original edition, Neuwied: Luchterhand,
1962 ] (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 51 (emphasis added); Structural
Transformation, xvii. (Transformation hereafter).
(^6) Habermas, Strukturwandel, 54; Transformation, 1.
(^7) Strukturwandel, 351; Transformation, 242.