206 Habermas: An intellectual biography
for society, setting limits to democracy in the name of natural law or
the Cold War. Jurists would no longer monopolize the interpreta-
tion of the constitution, and the constitution would be expected to
evolve. The state would have to learn to tolerate civil disobedience.
The legitimacy of legality would depend on expanded access to the
public sphere and a more robust democratic genesis of the laws.
Habermas’s description of the transformation of West German
political culture as the result of an “opening without reserve”^4 is
a myth, albeit a heroic and appealing one. The truth about West
Germany’s postwar transformation is more interesting, however.
The contours of the opening were jagged. In the late 1950s and early
1960s, Habermas struggled to find anything redeeming in Adenauer’s
chancellor democracy. Prominent figures on the left rallied to the
defense of the hitherto unloved Rechtsstaat in the Spiegel affair of
1962 and in the campaigns against the emergency powers-enabling
amendment to the constitution. Habermas joined in the defense of
the Rechtsstaat with other ‘58ers such as Jürgen Seifert, who together
helped to reorient the German left toward a sympathetic view of
liberal constitutionalism. As one scholar has written, “The danger
of the forces of conservatism eroding democracy by legal means
also sensitized many left-wing thinkers, who had previously been
focused mainly on the economy, to the autonomy of the political.”^5
Günther Frankenberg, who advised Habermas in questions of legal
theory in the late 1980s, was, for example, first politicized in the
campaigns of the 1960s against the emergency laws.^6 The threat of
technocratic governance sharpened Habermas’s focus on the ques-
tion of how to secure democratic legitimation for decisions of public
consequence. In the 1970s, the threat to popular sovereignty came
from the paternalism of the welfare state (the “juridification of the
lifeworld” in the Theory of Communicative Action) and a state that
overreacted to the threat of domestic radicalism. These heightened
Habermas’s awareness of the ambivalent promise of law as a means
of social integration.
Habermas was indeed a Westernizer of German political cul-
ture and a protagonist of its liberalization. But his embrace of the(^4) Habermas, “Die Neokonservativen,” 54; Interview with Axel Honneth,
“Dialektik,” 161.
(^5) See Müller, A Dangerous Mind, 186.
(^6) Author’s conversation with Professor Günter Frankenberg, June 25, 2005 ,
Frankfurt am Main.