34 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Adorno’s, Habermas’s choice of mentor was unusual – in retrospect,
a legible trace of his discontent with the prevailing dominance of
social and cultural theoretical paradigms over political and legal
ones at the Institute in the 1950s and sign of his relative radicalism
on the question of workers’ rights.
Various facets of the West German political context from
1956–62 were crucial for Habermas’s turn to political and legal the-
ory and for shaping the largely pessimistic conclusions he reached
in Students and Politics and Transformation. There were five key
issues for Habermas in these years: the 1956 decision of the Federal
Constitutional Court to ban the Communist Party, Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) political strength and Social Democratic
Party (SPD) weakness in the national elections of 1957, the SPD’s
ideological transformation at Bad Godesburg from a Marxist party
to a “people’s party” in 1959, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) decision to arm West Germany with nuclear weapons in
1957, and the ruling against an antinuclear plebiscite by the Federal
Constitutional Court in 1958. All five dimensions of the political
context reveal Habermas as an activist in the public sphere at the
same time that he was becoming a theorist of it.^27THE POLITICAL CONTEXTS OF A ‘58ERFor the drafters of the Basic Law, nothing was more important
than that Bonn should not be Weimar. The architects of the 1949
West German constitution considered the fundamental lesson of
the Weimar Republic to be that liberalism could no longer afford
to be agnostic about its own ultimate value. German judges rea-
soned that the Basic Law was more substantive than procedural,
more value-oriented than value-neutral on the fundamental ques-
tion of the goals, or identity, of the state. Unlimited tolerance, they
argued, expressed an unhealthy relativism about basic values that in
Weimar had been politically suicidal. Political parties openly com-
mitted to the destruction of the republican state form had exploited
constitutional guarantees of freedom of association, using them as a
Trojan horse to subvert democracy from within. The founders of the
Basic Law thus reasoned that boundaries needed to be drawn, gates(^27) U. W. Kitzinger, German Electoral Politics: A Study of the 1957 Campaign
(Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1960 ).