190 Habermas: An intellectual biography
defended the idea of a republican refounding.^77 A clear picture
emerges of a Habermas who was frustrated and on the defen-
sive: “Those who demanded it [a new constitutional assembly] were
laughed at as utopians, or were saddled, as usual, with the reputation
of a lack of loyalty to the constitution.”^78 This is a familiar theme in
Habermas’s writing and refers to his experience of being challenged
in the late 1970s by conservatives who sought to link the Frankfurt
School to domestic West German terrorism. Habermas disputed
the characterization of his project as utopian:
Was it so utopian to expect that the federal government, or at least
the SPD [Social Democratic Party], would take up the impulses set
in motion by the Round Table?... Is it too much to demand that an effort be made [to discuss these
issues] in the medium of public communication?^79
By May 1993, Habermas’s outrage had yielded to resignation: It
was certain that a republican refounding would not take place.
“Today we’re busy with other problems,” Habermas lamented.
These days... small stories buried in the back pages of the newspa-
pers report of what has come of the transfer of moral waste products
into West German management; of the politically crippled discus-
sions over a new constitution; of the vague appeals to dull national
feeling that go straight past the republican consciousness of a nation
of citizens.^80
The West German milieu of 1984–8, which had enabled
Habermas to challenge the exhaustion of utopian energies and to
formulate the ideal of a revolutionary constitutionalism, had, quite
ironically, vanished with the revolution of 1989. But the double
loss – first, the evaporation of the longed-for progressive majority in
the West, and second, the abortive failure to refound the republic –
added another set of motivations and a new horizon of significance
to Habermas’s stocktaking of the Bonn Republic’s history, an inven-
tory he had begun before 1989.
(^77) Haller, Past as Future, 44.
(^78) Ibid., 52.
(^79) Ibid.
(^80) Haller, “Afterword” (May 1993), in Haller, The Past as Future, 150. The
phrase “moral waste” is intended ironically.