Jürgen Habermas may be the most famous and important philosopher alive today. Throughout his long and productive career, he has made significant contributions to the subfields of political philosophy, social theory, legal theory, epistemology, ethics, and linguistics. Although his interests and abilities make him a particularly versatile thinker, he also is an amazingly consistent intellectual. Habermas remains one of the late twentieth century's most passionate defenders of rationality. Despite the fact that so many of his mentors and contemporaries worried about the fate of Reason in the aftermath of World War II, Habermas has dedicated much of his life to salvaging rationality. Postwar Germany, where Habermas helped to inspire the creation of a more self-critical civic and democratic culture, has been the greatest beneficiary of his reclamation project—and yet, it would be a mistake to see his impact limited to simply Europe and the United States. Over the past several months, numerous observers have drawn from Habermas's philosophical oeuvre to attempt to make sense of the surprising and swift events of the “Arab Spring.”

Matthew G. Specter has undertaken a significant challenge in his book, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography. In addition to displaying a mastery of Habermas's major texts, Specter is often at his best exploring in detail the contents of lesser-known essays, which he uses to clarify the development of key concepts and positions made famous in Habermas's classic writings. More impressively, Specter also carefully reconstructs the historical circumstances that inspired and provoked Habermas throughout his career. This requires a close attention to the history of West Germany from the end of World War II until the first years after reunification. During this period, Habermas functioned as one of the best-known public intellectuals in Europe. Although it might be tempting to separate the work of the public intellectual from the academic philosopher, Specter demonstrates to the reader how the public and philosophical personae are combined.

The title of the book may be a bit misleading. Readers expecting an “intellectual biography” will be disappointed. Specter's ambitions are more modest than the title suggests, but his feats are no less important or impressive. First, Specter seeks to use the history of West Germany to offer clarity regarding the evolution of Habermas's philosophical project, but he also wants to look at the impact of Habermas (and other intellectuals) on the legal and political history of the Federal Republic. Second, Specter seeks to challenge the scholarship of those who see Habermas's later work as an abandonment of his earlier radical commitments—a turn toward “liberalism” and “legalism.” As Specter explains, “this notion of a turn obscures the dramatic continuities in Habermas's thought . . . This book vigorously rejects the claim that the arc of Habermas's career as a political theorist can be characterized as one that moves from ‘radicalism to resignation’ . . . This study defends Habermas from these charges, arguing that Habermas's renovated liberal ideal is not only a radical solution to the problem of German statism but also an important contribution to progressive political theorizing generally” (pp. 25–26).

Toward these ends, Specter begins (chapters one and two) with a reconsideration of Habermas's early intellectual career and the origins of his concerns about the “public sphere.” In comparison to much of the secondary literature on Habermas, the Frankfurt School receives relatively little attention. Instead, Specter emphasizes Habermas's preoccupations with German constitutional theory, the Federal Constitutional Court, and the electoral problems that faced the Social Democratic Party in the late 1950s. Unlike the Adenauer government, Habermas was uncomfortable with the idea that democracy could be imported to Germany from its Cold-War allies. Instead, Habermas charted a path between competing camps of legal and political theorists (Carl Schmitt, Wolfgang Abendroth, and Rudolf Smend) to assess what had been rotten, what could be salvaged, and what needed to be built from scratch in postwar West Germany to establish a stable and healthy democratic and civil society.

In chapter three, Specter uses the discourses regarding technocracy during the 1960s to explain Habermas's complex relationship to the student movement, as well as to contemplate the origins of his theory of communicative action. While Habermas praised the student left for its critique of technocracy, he simultaneously criticized it for its broader rejections of science and legality. Habermas became famous for the phrase “left fascism”—a label he developed for West Germany's action factions; but Habermas was equally critical of the West German government's extraordinary measures that were taken to combat domestic terrorism. Both the revolutionaries and the authorities had lost track of the relationship between legality and legitimacy, and the circumstances prompted Habermas to attempt to elaborate this relationship.

In chapter four, Specter explores the relationships between the West German nuclear rearmament debate, the Historikerstreit, neoconservatism, and Westbindung. In 1979, Helmut Schmidt ignited a firestorm of controversy in Germany when he supported plans to deploy five hundred medium-range nuclear missiles in Germany. Opponents of the measure thought it was insane and initiated large-scale campaigns of protest and civil disobedience leading to the formation of the Green Party. The political right, led by Helmut Kohl, attacked the antinuclear activists as unpatriotic and anti-Western. While Habermas sympathized with the opponents of the missiles, he did not agree with those who wished to pull Germany out of NATO or those who saw a moral equivalence between the east and the west. Habermas sought to mediate between the two sides by calling upon both to join in the facilitation of a “nonidentical” Rechtsstaat—building German democracy on more solid moral grounds.

In chapter five, Specter reassesses Habermas's Between Facts and Norms. This book, more than anything else, led critics to accuse Habermas of moderation in the form of a “liberal” turn. Specter rejects such claims, by showing how the main concerns of the work were anticipated in all of the political and legal concerns that form the context for all of the preceding chapters. In fact, Specter sees Between Facts and Norms as both an intellectual history of the Federal Republic, as well as an autobiographical work. As Specter concludes, “his [Habermas's] critical stocktaking of the intellectual history of German legal theory in Between Facts and Norms revealed a Habermas who seemed ultimately to privilege popular sovereignty over human rights and thus implicitly a republican over a liberal model of political community. This was so because of Habermas's reading of the history of judicial activism and a paternalistic welfare state in the Bonn Republic convinced him that legitimacy of the laws in the end rested on their legal form or moral content” (p. 201).

While Specter makes a strong case for taking these legal and political issues more seriously and suggesting their inspiration for much of Habermas's early work, the focus also helps to de-emphasize the radicalism of the young Habermas—making the larger argument about consistency easier to make. The problem with this heavy emphasis on the legal and constitutional context is that other developments and positions from the early, middle, and late years are lost. What, for example, was the nature of Habermas's initial debt to Marx? How and why did this change over time? Similarly, what were Habermas's attitudes about some of the more specific key concepts within the tradition of Critical Theory—such as reification, mass society, and autonomy? To read Specter, one gets the impression that the key difference between Habermas and Horkheimer/Adorno is their readings and interpretations of Weber—but weren't their differing appraisals of Nietzsche also significant in shaping Habermas's early and late projects? To read Specter, one gets the impression that Adorno was strictly an “ivory tower” mandarin, which obscures the fact that he was the driving force behind the famous Gruppenexperiment, as well as a major public intellectual who shared many of Habermas's concerns about the future of German democracy and society. In a similar manner, Specter briefly mentions Habermas's debt to the American pragmatist tradition—which would seem to indicate that he fails to appreciate the importance and significance of that inspiration for his philosophy. Habermas is an undeniably German thinker with firm commitments to German intellectual traditions and contemporary history, but he is also a transatlantic scholar—a thinker who has supplemented his intellectual inheritance with foreign imports when necessary. In general, one worries whether Specter may have given the reader too much of a good thing. The political/legal context is illuminating and offers new and significant vantage points for reconsidering Habermas's social theoretical project, but these new offerings come at the expense of an underemphasis on the broader and more technical philosophical debates that have also shaped Habermas's writings.