210 Habermas: An intellectual biography
peculiarly religious metaphor, “to go around in sack and ashes.”^9
“The destruction of Eastern Bloc socialism is trumpeted by Strauss
[of the Christian Social Union] and overlooks the fact that “... this
socialism was sharply criticized within the left – not least out of fear
that socialism would be equated with... Soviet Marxism.”^10 The
“non-communist left left of Social Democracy,” Habermas asserted,
had neither succumbed to illusions about communism nor failed to
keep alive an awareness of the price European social democratic
parties had paid for the achievement of their post–World War II
welfare states.^11 It thus was uniquely positioned to bear a new pro-
gressive agenda. This left is today the “bearer of the memory” that
“more was meant” by socialism than state-driven social policy.^12
East German intellectuals would have to learn what “... we in the
West learned decades ago: to develop a self-critique of the capital-
ist, mass democratic, constitutional welfare state, with its strengths
and weaknesses.”^13 After the expiration of state socialism, this mode
of critique was “... the single eye of the needle through which all
mu st pass.”^14 Habermas’s reading of the significance of 1989 is but
one part of his larger corpus of reflections on the postwar European
welfare state, its material successes and institutional shortcomings.
His reconstructive history of modern legal and political theory
offers today’s radical reformers a usable past.
While Habermas ultimately came to view the Marxian and
Weberian views of law as too “thin,” he also arrived at the conclu-
sion that the Schmittian and Smendian versions of law were too
“thick.” This book presents the constitutional and political theory
of Carl Schmitt as a constitutive element of major public debates: the
Schmittian critique of the Basic Law and the welfare state in the
1950s, the turn to theories of technocracy by German conservatives
in the 1960s, and the arguments developed by conservative jurists
in the 1980s against civil disobedience. In each of these contexts,
Habermas saw different versions of the same threats: the dangers of9 Habermas, “Was heisst Sozialismus heute?” in idem, Die nachholende
Revolution: Kleine Politische Schriften VII (Frankfurt/Main, 1990), 188 (NR
hereafter).(^10) Habermas, “Die Stunde der nationalen Empfindung. Republikanische
Gesinnung oder Nationalbewusstein?” in NR, 164.
(^11) Habermas,”Was heisst Sozialismus heute?,” 192–3.
(^12) Ibid.
(^13) Ibid., 203.
(^14) Ibid.