38 Habermas: An intellectual biography
In the years 1959–61, therefore, Habermas’s relationship with
Abendroth deepened. While Habermas worked on his Habilitation,
he also joined Abendroth in the Socialist Sponsors group. To under-
stand the significance of Abendroth’s legal theory for Habermas
and why Habermas followed Abendroth out of the SPD, we need
to understand what was being debated at Godesburg. Sketching
briefly Abendroth’s position in the debate on the social-market
economy (soziale Marktwirtschaft) illustrates how far to the left
both Abendroth’s and Habermas’s positions were on the political-
economic spectrum of debate. Generally, Abendroth argued that
the idea of the social-market economy and “acclamation for the eco-
nomic miracle” were the two most characteristic “ideologies of the
Restoration period.”^40
Godesburg, the culmination of a half decade of rethinking the
party’s core positions, reconceived socialism as an ethical position.
The “ethical socialist” ideas of the 1920s Kantian Leonhard Nelson
(1882–1927) were revived. Overtures were made to the churches,
a gesture unthinkable before Kurt Schumacher’s death in 1952. A
leading historian of the SPD explains that the Godesburg platform
replaced the theory of class struggle “... with a conviction in ‘basic
values’ and ‘basic demands’ which could be grounded in different
way s.”^41 The platform announced that the tradition of “democratic
socialism... in Europe” declared its roots in “Christian ethics, in
humanism and in classical philosophy.”^42 Instead of class conflict and
the socialization of means of production, there would be demand
for a more just distribution of wealth. From now on, the state
“... is responsible for a forward-looking policy to control the busi-
ness cycle, and should restrict itself mainly to indirect methods of
i n fluenci ng t he economy.”^43 To Abendroth, however, the Godesburg
platform exchanged the rigor of historical materialism for a bundle
of “inert values.”^44 Writing in 1976, Abendroth recalled the signfi-
cance of the Godesburg platform as “only a variant of the dominant
opinion, instead of a real alternative” and in many ways to the right
of the CDU’s Christian Socialist-influenced Ahlen Program of(^40) Dietrich, Leben, 209, 246.
(^41) Suzanne Miller and Heinrich Potthof, Kleine Geschichte der SPD. Darstellung
und Dokumentation, 1848–1980 (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1983 ).
(^42) Nicholls, Social Market Economy, 367.
(^43) Ibid.
(^44) In Dietrich, Leben, 209, 246.