Any visitor to the Germany of 1945—indeed, the Germany of much of the 1950s—would have been struck by a country whose cities were full of ruins and rubble. However, this same visitor would also have found each of these cities to be connected to one another by the modern Autobahn. In this setting, one could speed efficiently from one bombed-out city to another. And yet, within the ruined apartment buildings and homes of these same cities, one could still encounter elements of the high bourgeois culture of prewar Germany, as well as a new generation of writers and critics seeking to debate the past and future of the country. It is in this context of ruins and reconstruction that Jakob Norberg’s Sociability and its Enemies seeks to locate some of the central figures of postwar German political thought: Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, and Reinhart Kosselleck, as well as Dolf Sternberger, one of the founders of political science within Germany, though less well known outside of the country.

The first four figures are studied as central to the field of political theory, often in critical dialogue with one another. But rarely has that dialogue been viewed as a response to the specific condition of a ruined postwar Germany and the debate over how to reconstruct its political culture in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Nazi regime. Norberg seeks not just to provide this context but also to reconstruct the fierce and often contentious debate that ensued among these political thinkers over whether or not German politics could be revived on the basis of bourgeois norms of sociability, (“bürgerliche”). To this end, he offers an intellectual-historical narrative in which Habermas’s most influential work, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991), appears not merely as the beginning of his lifelong project of reconstructing public discussion and deliberation as the source for political legitimacy in liberal states, but also as an attempt to reframe the debate among Schmitt, Arendt, Koselleck, and Sternberger on whether or not bourgeois norms and culture could serve as the source of a revived postwar German politics. Viewed in this light, Norberg’s contextualization does not so much relativize the political thought of Arendt, Schmitt, Kosseleck, and Habermas within a particular German historical context as give us a way of understanding the deeply entwined political—and often polemical—interests driving their respective theories.

Central to the narrative of this book is the figure of Sternberger and his short-lived journal Die Wandlung (The Transition), which was published from 1945 to 1949. He was a central figure in postwar German intellectual life, often serving as a counterpoint to these other more influential thinkers. In the pages of Die Wandlung, according to Norberg, Sternberger sought to revive a revised concept of bourgeois “Geselligkeit” (sociability) as a norm that might fill the vacuum left by a discredited state and society in collapse. In German means a basic inclination to sociability, to geniality, to enjoy life with others in a lighthearted way separate from the instrumental activities of work or profession—its typical location being the bar, a gathering of guests, or the local association. Likewise bürgerliche or “bourgeois sociability” as Sternberger understood it, meant an easygoing style of social interaction in which distinctly middle-class individuals conducted conversations with tolerance and restraint such that opinions could be exchanged in a friendly and egalitarian manner. Such exchange would occur without great contention, and above all without any one individual asserting her/his authority. Sternberger, as Norberg tells the story, hoped that this appropriation of a kind of middle-class sociability could serve as reeducation for the whole of German civil society to norms of tolerance and participation with others. He also suggested that it could serve as the rules for intellectual interchange in his journal.

Not surprisingly, as Norberg notes, Schmitt’s and Arendt’s immediate responses to Sternberger’s project were implacably hostile. Schmitt—seeking to generalize the occupation authorities’ inquiries into his own Nazi sympathies—argued that attempts of intellectuals like Sternberger to revive civil society through sociable speech betrayed a refusal to acknowledge that “conversation” (Gespräch) in this new occupied Germany had become “interrogation” (Verhör) into each individual’s most hidden thoughts (pp. 64–66). Schmitt then ties this argument to his prewar arguments that bourgeois sociability historically had replaced the “political” with endless discussion and a refusal to acknowledge a moment of rupture when a political decision has to be made and sovereign authority asserted. For Schmitt, on Norberg’s account, sociable conversation and interaction appear as a devious strategy to substitute the fiction of a self-organizing society for the inevitability of a coercive state agency. But the irony of this strategy, as the author acutely points out, is that Schmitt must launch this criticism in private notebooks or risk capitulation to the very bourgeois conversation he so despises.

Norberg’s illuminating account of Arendt’s many articles in Die Wandlung reveals a political thinker for whom every aspect of bourgeois society is complicit with the worst depredations of the twentieth century. Two of the many arguments Norberg discusses stand out. The first, on “Imperialism,” consists of her attempt to link the high bourgeois with “the mob,” that, is the population of resentful and aggressive outcasts of society. The latter, she argues, represents the repressed prehistory of the former. The second argument, from “The Organization of Collective Guilt,” rotates around her claim that the German “Spiessbürger,” the uniquely security-obsessed German petit bourgeois, was the perfect character type for the modern organization in which everyone dutifully performed their function without taking responsibility for the whole. This combination of character type and organization allowed the Nazi regime to render all citizens complicit with their genocidal policies. While these two arguments prefigure her later work, Norberg acutely demonstrates that Arendt’s aim was not to provide an alternative for Germany but to demonstrate that every bourgeois type—high bourgeois, petit bourgeois, capitalist, and consumer—and every form of bourgeois interaction was complicit with the very forces for which it was now offered as an alternative: organizational conformity, imperialism, and genocide. Against this backdrop, her later account of politics as speech and action of publicly engaged citizens seems more of a concrete alternative than a purely abstract argument about what we have lost.

Writing after Schmitt and Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck attacks the neutrality and apolitical inclinations of the bourgeois from a different concept of politics and a different narrative of bourgeois complicity. Thus, in his influential Criticism and Crises (1959), he produces a Schmitt-inspired historical narrative in which the eighteenth century European bourgeoisie, seeking to force the state to legitimate its actions rationally before a critical public, suffers from self-delusion while also pursuing a cunning strategy to undermine the fundamental fact of all politics, that ultimate authority of the state rests on a political decision. Koselleck’s work appears, on this account, as an attempt to vindicate Schmitt’s attack on sociability by historicizing his contemporaneous argument, though Norberg quite convincingly sees a paranoid logic at work here in which the enemies of decisionism are found everywhere.

Habermas, on Norberg’s narrative, becomes at once a synthesis of these contending positions and a critical response to Schmitt, Arendt, and Koselleck’s Schmitt-inspired accounts. As Norberg puts it, “[Arendt’s and Schmitt’s] images of genuine political life and concomitant critiques of bourgeois society do not just appear as sources and occasional references; they determine the structure and the character of a large part of his argument” (p. 129). Thus, on Norberg’s reading, Habermas’s multilayered historical sociology indirectly transforms Sternberger’s benign apolitical bourgeois sociability into the driving force of a reasoning bourgeois public whose aim is to explicitly challenge the legitimacy of the state and its exercise of power.

Norberg finds a difficulty in Habermas’s recovery of Sternberger’s sociability, however. Specifically, he argues that in Structural Transformation, Habermas never quite establishes how the apolitical sociability of the eighteenth-century bourgeois could have become the active legitimating political public of his narrative (pp. 145–47). Though a plausible criticism, I would suggest that Habermas does indeed demonstrate how this threshold from a sociable to a “political” public sphere was crossed through his pivotal account of politics in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, when the literary public becomes the reading and discussing bourgeois public, reacting to the public debates in Parliament between competing parties, such that the minority party appeals to the judgment of the public or “the people” behind the back of the majority electorate and the journals and newspapers become a transmission point sending “public opinion” back to the parties in Parliament and reporting parliamentary debates back to the public. (See Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere pp. 64–73).

Norberg seems to be on considerably stronger ground in the clever way in which he demonstrates Habermas’s Structural Transformation argument to be not just an agenda for future research but an acutely self-conscious polemical reckoning with postwar critics like Koselleck, Schmitt, and Arendt over the possibilities for realizing a democratic politics in postwar Germany by redeeming a prior ideal of bourgeois public discussion and ultimately rendering it (historically) available to all citizens.

Indeed, it is in revealing the overall polemical nature of the postwar German debate over sociability that Norberg’s book truly comes into its own. To be sure, his book can be read as an intellectual history of the critical responses to Sternberger’s project of recovering a unique kind of German Geselligkeit. But its real contribution is in the way he lays out the polemical strategy deployed by the three political critics to discredit Sternberger’s project and Habermas’s polemical strategy of recovering it on a new, more secure, political footing. That is, Norberg shows how each critic in her/his own unique way sought to connect Sternberger’s seemingly unthreatening, indeed benign, version of bourgeois sociability to a flight from the demands of politics and to the most threatening and destructive features of modern social life. In turn, he uncovers Habermas’s historical-sociological account of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere to be part and parcel of a cunning polemical strategy in which he incorporates Schmitt and Arendt in ways opposed to their own critiques of bourgeois society and politics while turning Koselleck's story of bourgeois (self) deception on its head. It is not too great a stretch to see this polemical element in Habermas’s more abstract later work as well. Revealing not just the postwar problematic but the polemical strategy in the work of each of these influential political thinkers is no small accomplishment, and surely will lead us to read their work in a whole new light.