204 Habermas: An intellectual biography
as complementary – integration along dual tracks. The change in
Habermas’s perspective on Adenauer reflects the extent to which
Habermas came to identify with a North Atlantic political model
of liberal democracy. In bringing much of German academic and
progressive public opinion along with him, he contributed to a
liberalization of the German left.
Recall that in the 1950s debate over the social welfare state, it
was the Schmittians who defended the ideal of the Rechtsstaat. In
the context of the failed denazification of the universities, judiciary,
and government, the ideal of the rule of law appeared to many left-
ists to be a mirage. Habermas’s signature achievement as citizen of
the Bonn Republic was to help the left reacquire an appreciation for
the normative and institutional value of liberal constitutional order.
By driving many of the most important representatives of the inter-
war Social Democratic traditions in legal theory into exile – Hans
Kelsen, Hermann Heller, Karl Loewenstein, Ernst Fraenkel, Franz
Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer – the Third Reich severed the
conceptual links between Rechtsstaat, welfare state, and democracy.
Habermas’s search for a method in the late 1950s was disoriented by
this absence. His association with Wolfgang Abendroth was the key
biographical fact that allowed him to pick up the thread of Weimar
debates, going back to the classics of Schmitt and Smend and for-
ward to the Schmitt school and Smend’s influence on the Federal
Constitutional Court. A series of high-profile court cases, espe-
cially the Lüth judgment of 1958, helped Habermas to consolidate
his approach to Critical Theory on the postwar German terrain of
Cold War and the Basic Law.
From Karl Marx, the writers of the Frankfurt School, and
Wolfgang Abendroth, Habermas learned to be sceptical of the
Rechtsstaat and its signatures – the separation of powers, the gener-
ality of the legal norm – as the political expression of bourgeois class
interests. Because Habermas wrote The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere in a framework contrasting state and civil society
that he inherited from the thinkers Lorenz von Stein, Hegel
and Marx, his text echoed the Marxian critique of legality. But
Transformation also contained strong but previously neglected sub-
terranean themes: a lament for the power of legal norms that had
been eclipsed by the positivist cast of American political science
and its German imitations, and the Marxian reduction of law to
superstructure. Constitutional law appeared to Habermas as the