Between Critical Theory and the Basic Law: Habermas and Political Theory in Postwar Germany

In this paper, I present the thesis of my recent book, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2010), highlighting the historical contexts for Habermas’s innovative reorientation of the Critical Theory or “Frankfurt School” tradition. Habermas’s revival of the political and legal theory dimensions of Critical Theory was driven by his effort to stabilize West German democracy in the 1950s, and navigate the intellectual legacies of Weimar and the Third Reich for doing so. Highlighting the tight interconnections between his occasional political writings and major theoretical works like the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and Between Facts and Norms (1992), yields an unfamiliar Habermas, whose salience as a radical reformer of German political institutions and intellectual traditions comes into view. Not merely an abstract philosopher of justice, language, or communication, Habermas renewed the tradition of Critical Theory to meet the exigencies of political and constitutional crisis in postwar Germany over four decades. In the paper, I also offer a defense of the contextual method of interpretation of this formidably abstract thinker.