Conclusion 207
rule of law signified neither the end of Critical Theory nor the end
of history in the neoliberal sense. As discussed in Chapter 4 , the
multidimensional political crisis of 1981–7 – from Euromissiles to
Historikerstreit – was the theater in which Habermas worked out
his own account of We s t bi n d u ng, the key to which was his redefi-
nition of the West as a fallibilistic, open, democratic experiment.
The price exacted for constitutional patriotism was civil disobedi-
ence. By explicating the specific dignity of civil disobedience, he
reenchanted the Rechtsstaat. By trying to draw legality and morality
closer together without collapsing the two spheres, Habermas sought
to chart a middle path between two historical variants of German
statism: legal positivism and natural law jurisprudence. Ultimately,
Habermas’s reconstructive work on the concepts of modernity and
constitutionalism in the 1980s staged a mutually transformative
encounter between Germany and the West that has helped to keep
the meaning of Western liberal democracy open for all its citizens.
For that we are in his debt.
Habermas’s career and corpus provide a privileged vantage
point for thinking about postwar Germany because the reserva-
tions he had about the opening to the West were thoughtful and
revealing of real problems in German public life. These included
strong criticisms of the juridification of politics, the countermajori-
tarian power of judges, and the threat posed by human rights con-
ceived metaphysically and implemented paternalistically. With his
critical perspective on the value jurisprudence of the “Karlsruhe
Republic,” Habermas provided us with a new variant of the dialec-
tic of enlightenment: a dialectic of legal enlightenment in which
human rights can become a tool of state power rather than a barrier
against it.
Habermas’s search for a method for redeeming the original
validity claim of the Rechtsstaat drove him to become an interdis-
ciplinary thinker. No other figure in postwar German intellectual
life reformulated such broad swaths of German philosophical and
political discourse. His lengthy forays into jurisprudence led him to
Carl Schmitt and his school and contributed to the belated process
of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the legal field. His career also sheds
light on the critical generation of the ‘58ers, who did so much to
reorient German political culture. Finally, Habermas is a represen-
tative of the broader West German literate public sphere of which
the publishing house Suhrkamp is an emblem.