42 Habermas: An intellectual biography
the emerging German welfare state: “Before such a state divides or
redistributes, it must take, be it through taxes or duties, [or] distri-
bution of work places.... But only a God, who created the world out
of nothing, can give without taking, and even he, only in the realm
of the world created by him out of nothing.”^65 Thus Schmitt saw the
welfare state as a kind of sacrilege.
Forsthoff elaborated Schmitt’s critique. The urge to reinterpret
the Rechtsstaat in social terms was comprehensible, he conceded, but
the emerging body of social security, labor, rent, and housing law
“... detonates the rechtsstaatlichen structure of the constitution.”^66
Social policy should be a matter for administrative law, not consti-
t ut iona l law.^67 Forsthoff protested against the “adjectival diminu-
tion” of the Rechtsstaat ideal: “Liberal, bourgeois, national, social
and chiefly, national socialist Rechtsstaat. They all indicated stations
of decline.”^68 In dramatic contrast, Abendroth used the concept
of a democratic and social Rechtsstaat as the unifying interpretive
principle for his reading of the Basic Law as a whole.^69 Through
this hermeneutic lens, one could reshape “the inherited thought of
the liberal Rechtsstaat.”^70 The two principles, Rechtsstaatlichkeit and
Sozialstaatlichkeit, were not antithetical.
Articles 20 and 28, Abendroth argued, were a reminder by the
framers that the basic rights enumerated in the Basic Law should
not be construed too narrowly as a “... restorative or conservative
endorsement of the existing social and economic order”; rather,
they “... [held] open the possibility of... enlarged social rights and
another system of social order.”^71 Abendroth sought to reconceive
the rights he viewed as negative and exclusionary rights against the
state as “participatory” or “social” rights, stating: “The constitution(^65) Schmitt, “Nehmen, Teilen, Weiden,” 112, 113.
(^66) Forsthoff, “Begriff und Wesen des Sozialen Rechtsstaates,” [1954], in idem,
Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Sozialstaatlichkeit, 187.
(^67) Ibid., 167.
(^68) Ibid., 8–12.
(^69) The concept of the social Rechtsstaat was a “fundamental principle”
(Rechtsgrundsatz) legitimating the entire system of the Basic Law and not a
mere statute (Rechtssatz).
(^70) Ibid., 87.
(^71) “Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtsstaates. Ausspräche zu den Berichten
in den Verhandlungen der Tagung der deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer zu Bonn
am 15. und 16. Oktober 1953. Die auswärtige Gewalt der Bundesrepublik,”
eds. Wilhelm G. Grewe, Eberhard Menzel, Veröffentlichungen des Vereins der
deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer, 12 [1954], 91.