212 Habermas: An intellectual biography
German tradition but by doing so also helped anchor West Germany
in the West. As such, his thought played a dramatic part in the intel-
lectual reconstruction and recovery work of the Bonn Republic, a
polity whose historical contours are now becoming clearer. Making
good on the promise of the Rechtsstaat was an agenda rooted in
Habermas’s biographical circumstances – his generational identity
as a ‘58er. Not only his explicit political and legal thought but also
his social theory bear the unmistakeable imprint of its genesis over
four decades in the Bonn Republic.