28 Habermas: An intellectual biography
shape in the German constitutional law tradition since Lorenz von
Stein.”^1 This chapter’s argument takes Habermas’s hint as a point of
departure. It contends that the most decisive intellectual stimuli to
his reformulation of Frankfurt School cultural pessimism came from
his encounter with a distinct intellectual field: the West German
constitutional law and political science of the 1950s. The yield of
reading Transformation alongside three minor works from the same
period – “On the Concept of Political Participation” (1961, writ-
ten in 1958), “On the Classical Doctrine of Politics and Its Relation
to Social Philosophy” (1963), and “Natural Law and Revolution”
(1963) – clearly supports this interpretive strategy. Constitutional
lawyers in the 1950s divided into three distinct groupings or infor-
mal “schools.” Each of the three recapitulated positions first claimed
during the Weimar Republic. Two prominent students of Carl
Schmitt – Werner Weber (1904–76) and Ernst Forsthoff – adapted
and modernized arguments first made by their teacher in the 1920s
and 1930s. The judges on the Federal Constitutional Court in the
1950s were influenced by the Weimar-era writings of Rudolf Smend
(1882–1975), a key interlocutor of Schmitt’s in Weimar and one of the
most influential teachers of law in postwar West Germany. The theo-
retical positions held by Wolfgang Abendroth (1900– 85 ) restated and
updated those of an important Weimar-era Social Democratic jurist,
Hermann Heller (1891–1933). Each of these schools – that of Schmitt,
Smend, and Abendroth – considered one branch of the new govern-
ment in Bonn its preferred “g uardian of t he const it ut ion”: These were
the executive, the judicial, and the legislative branches, respectively.
Because they do not fit neatly within any one of these three schools of
political/legal theory, Habermas’s early political writings constitute
a challenging bricolage and have been subjected to intense scrutiny.^2
One controversy turned on Habermas’s reception of Schmitt’s polit-
ical thought, which seemed to some critics to indicate a fundamental
illiberalism in Habermas’s early works, a puzzling anomaly in the oeu-
vre of Germany’s most prominent left-liberal thinker. But character-
izing Habermas as a “left-Schmittian” critic of liberal democracy did(^1) Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and
the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992 ),
431– 61.
(^2) See Ellen Kennedy, “Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School,” Te l o s 71
(Spring 1987 ), 37–66, with responses from Martin Jay, Alfons Söllner, and
Ulrich Preuss, 36–117.