Conclusion 209
political economy in which he had never felt “at home.” Attacks on
the German Rechtsstaat by the German right in the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s enabled Habermas to transcend this limitation of much
Marxist thought and to feel more “at home,” as it were, with the
liberal democratic West. As he explained in a recent interview, he
has long considered himself a “left-liberal.”^7 When asked whether
his political theory displays a “legal” or “liberal” turn in the 1980s,
he replied:
No, the interest in legal theory stems from the 1950s, as I came to
know the literature, and regretted not having studied law. The idea
of a liberal turn isn’t correct in my view: I was a “left-liberal, left
of Social Democracy” in the ‘60s also. But my interest in political
economy, in which I had never felt at home, declined.... I believe
that I have been true to my basic political convictions.... You should
not underestimate that in the ‘60s, a left loyal to the constitution
existed that was left of the Godesburg SPD; I felt I belonged to
this group: we took socialism seriously, if also in confrontation with
Soviet Communism. If you had passed through the controls at the
Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse on the way to the GDR [as Habermas had
done in 1952 in order to see a Brecht piece at the Berliner Ensemble],
one must be healed of all illusions.^8
In March 1990, Habermas circulated an essay to friends address-
ing the question of how socialism should be rethought after 1989.
Habermas believed that the collapse of East German communism
vindicated positions he had held since the early 1960s. His descrip-
tion of “the West European left” as a homogeneous group that had
only been burdened by Eastern Bloc distortions of socialism but
never deceived by it was problematic as a general statement but fair
as a self-description. His participation in annual discussions with
the Yugoslavian “Praxis” group of nonaligned left theorists, which
met throughout the 1970s on the island of Korcula, was consistent
with his self-description as a representative of a non-communist
left.
For this non-communist left, he argued, the appropriate reac-
tion to the velvet revolutions of 1989 was neither melancholy,
disillusionment, nor contrition. They had no reason, to cite his
(^7) Author’s private correspondence with Habermas, June 7, 2005.
(^8) Ibid.