Recasting Democratic Theory, 1984–1996 201
he tried to resolve by embracing the progressive jurists’ agenda of a
new constitutional assembly for the Berlin Republic. His reactions
to the German reunification process betrayed his ultimate convic-
tion that republican institutions could survive only if they were
complemented by a liberal political culture, a set of attitudes and
dispositions that could meet institutions “halfway.”^110
Conversely, his critical stocktaking of the intellectual history
of German legal theory in BFN revealed a Habermas who seemed
ultimately to privilege popular sovereignty over human rights and
thus implicitly a republican over a liberal model of political commu-
nity. This was so because Habermas’s reading of the history of judi-
cial activism and a paternalistic welfare state in the Bonn Republic
convinced him that the legitimacy of the laws in the end rested on
the democratic conditions of their genesis rather than on their legal
form or moral content. The procedural vision Habermas worked
out between 1984 and 1992 – and which he has remained committed
to since – is the mature statement of his political theory. It is hard
to imagine him revising it in its fundamentals. BFN was consistent
with Habermas’s lifelong commitment to a radical reform of liberal
constitutionalism; in this work, he adapted this project to the new
circumstances of the 1980s and 1990s rather than abdicating some-
thing essential in Habermasian Critical Theory. By decribing itself as
the antithesis of diverse incarnations of “concreteness,” Habermas’s
procedural theory of law and democracy offered a powerful rhetori-
cal reformulation of the utopian longings of the German Left. Far
from a document of political resignation, BFN scrutinizes the Bonn
Republic for instruction on Berlin’s future: It is a bridge that links
the two historical continents.
(^110) See supra note 55.