203Two major premises guided this study. The first is that Habermas’s
theoretical and political writings provide a unique vantage point
from which to consider major developments in postwar German
history. The second is that historical contextualization of Habermas
within the postwar German frame yields an entirely new under-
standing of what is central to his theoretical project. We begin with
the first. The recivilization of West Germany within the framework
of Western liberal institutions and values was a historical process
of great significance for Europe and the world. Habermas’s career
illuminates this transformation. Consider his statement from the
early 1990s:
In hindsight... I recognize that as a student and in the immediate
years thereafter, I didn’t have an adequate assessment of the his-
torical consequences of Adenauer’s greatest achievement – binding
the Federal Republic strongly with the Western alliance and the
Western social model... Nevertheless, our radical opposition to
[the] spirit [of restoration] of the Adenauer era appears to me to be
still justified. Without [it]... a sense of zivilisierter Bürgersinn, or a
civic mentality as such, would never have been able to develop in the
Federal Republic.^1
In this passage, Habermas achieved a new historical perspec-
tive on the Federal Republic, the state with which his intellectual
and political career had long been intertwined. For Habermas,
Adenauer had long signified above all the “restoration spirit” of
the 1950s – its hidden and not-so-hidden continuities with the
Nazi past. But where Habermas once saw a contradiction between
We s t bi n d u ng and the cultivation of a civic mentality, Habermas
later understood the two processes of integration with the West
Conclusion
(^1) Haller, The Past as Future, 49.