Synthesizer of Constitutional Theory, 1958–1963 61
of opinion research pose for Staatslehre [state theory] and political
science – at least in Germany – have not customarily been taken
up by the staatswissenschaftlichen [sciences of state] faculties.”^8 Thus
Habermas noticed what he called a “gap” opening between the aca-
demic disciplines: “The feedback [obtained from opinion research
and through its categories] cannot close the gap between public
opinion as a fiction of constitutional law and the social- psychological
decomposition of its concept.”^9 Public opinion was a topic that had
fallen, as it were, through the cracks in the intellectual field.
Habermas’s critique of the “positivistic” character of contempo-
rary political science cohered with the Frankfurt School tradition
of critiquing positivist distortions of social science. But his valoriza-
tion of the tradition of Staatsrechtslehre introduced an element alien
to the Frankfurt School traditions of which he was most aware. As
he explained:
In contemporary political science, in contrast to classical social
philosophy and the older Staatsrechtslehre, democracy is not derived
from principles; they replace the objective meaning of institutions
with their abstract determinations. Instead of deducing democracy
from principles of legality [Rechtsstaatlichkeit] and popular sover-
eignty, it is defined by its actual apparatuses.^10
Habermas’s contrast between a concept of democracy derived
from principles and a concept defined by its apparatuses was his way
of critiquing what he saw as the strongly negative influence of the
positivist trend in American political science on the newly refounded
German discipline. Interdisciplinary social science with an emanci-
patory intent was part of Horkheimer’s original vision of Critical
Theory, but American political science seemed to Habermas to hold
no resources to arrest the decline of the public sphere.
THE PLEBISCITARY DISTORTION OF DEMOCRACY
The first major theme of Transformation is: Was democracy really
only about the periodic “plebiscitary acclamation” of elite decisions?
8 Wilhelm Hennis, Öffentliche Meinung und Repräsentative Demokratie
(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1956 ), 13.
9 Habermas, Strukturwandel, 353; Transformation, 244 (emphasis added).
(^10) Habermas, “Reflexionen über den Begriff der Politischen Beteiligung,” in
Student und Politik, eds. Ludwig von Friedeburg, Jürgen Habermas, Christoph