208 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Habermas’s interest in American pragmatism and appropriation
of John Austin’s speech-act theory have led many readers to consider
Habermas a bridge-builder between the spheres of Anglo-American
analytic and Continental philosophy. Habermas’s description of the
opening without reserve, too, addressed the German reception of
American philosophers in particular. This book has shown, by con-
trast, that Habermas is preeminently a German thinker, but not
in an essentialist sense. A major theme of this book is Habermas’s
decades-long struggle with the intellectual legacies of Max Weber,
Karl Marx, and Carl Schmitt, thinkers who cast a long shadow
over any effort to conceptualize the relationship between law and
politics. Habermas’s struggle required him to work through per-
sistent antinomies in German intellectual traditions: the so-called
formal versus the material elements in law, the Rechtsstaat and the
Sozialsstaat, legal positivism and natural law, the state’s monopoly
on violence and the right of resistance.
From Max Weber and his mentors at the Institute for Social
Research, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Habermas
absorbed a narrative of the history of the West as a story of decline.
The ascent of instrumental rationality in the economic and political
realms had yielded a net loss in human freedom. Weber’s critique of
the regulatory law of the German social welfare state set the agenda
for a century of German legal theorists who worried about law’s
“deformalization” by considerations of social justice. Thinkers thus
oscillated between the conceptual poles Weber’s work codified –
the “formal” and the “material.” As shown in Chapters 2 and 3 ,
Habermas in the 1960s confronted Max Weber’s theory of legal
positivism and the way technocratic and decisionist politics seemed
to flow from the refusal to burden law with moral and political con-
tent. In the 1970s, Habermas developed his theory of communicative
action in explicit opposition to the reductive account of rationality
he believed was Weber’s legacy to Horkheimer and Adorno. Finally,
in the 1980s and early 1990s, Habermas identified Max Weber’s
thought as a major obstacle to the contemporary ability to grasp the
internal connection between democratic deliberation and the rule
of law.
Although Habermas insists on his filiation to Marxist tradition
broadly conceived, it is clear that Marx’s denigration of the rule of
law was incompatible with Habermas’s intellectual project in the
1980s. Marxism had exiled Habermas, as it were, to a discourse of