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In “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” Hannah Arendt observed appositely, “When all are guilty no one in the last analysis can be judged.”Footnote ⁷ Thus the sheer continuity of personnel (politicians and civil servants, for example) from the Nazi era to the Federal Republic's early years posed a major moral obstacle to credible democratic reform. After all, how could one have confidence in the political culture of a nation many of whose leaders were ex-Nazis? The policy of the United States of hastily forgiving Nazi crimes in light of the incipient anticommunist struggle—in the State Department's eyes, ex-Nazis, as avowed anticommunists, suddenly became valuable intelligence “assets”—also represented a serious hindrance.

But as both Moses and Specter demonstrate, one of the main obstacles to establishing a viable German liberalism lay with the pronounced antidemocratic biases of the German intellectual mandarinate, which, during the postwar years, remained extremely influential in both educational and government circles. In the eyes of German conservatives, the Third Reich and its crimes had more to do with 1789 and doctrines of popular sovereignty than it did with Bismarck's intemperate Machtpolitik or the political deformations of the Kaiserreich.Footnote ⁸ Only with the 1961 controversy surrounding Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 was this conservative outlook systematically challenged. Democracy, they held, was a one-way street toward the perils of “mass society,” and, as such, a slippery slope toward dictatorship.

Moses refers to the postwar mandarins as “integrative republicans.” The integrative republicans comprised German conservatives who grudgingly made their peace with the formal requirements and provisions of the Rechtsstaat (in contrast with the “authoritarian state” or Obrigkeitsstaat of the Second Empire). Yet, convinced that the centrifugal tendencies of modern society offered fertile ground for political extremism in both its left- and right-wing variants, they remained apostles of Ordnungsdenken, or a philosophy of “order”; hence they were constantly in search of strong institutional moorings that would ensure collective political loyalty in an era of heightened social differentiation. Moses contrasts the integrative republicans with “redemptive republicans” like Habermas, Karl Jaspers, and Wolfgang Abendroth, who believed that, in order to emerge from Hitler's shadow, Germany required a genuine political rebirth—a qualitative transformation that would fulfill the progressive, social-democratic aspirations that had been nipped in the bud by Hitler's January 1933 Machtergreifung. However, on a number of occasions (most notably in “Three Models of Democracy”), Habermas has expressed pointed reservations about the communitarian implications of republicanism, i.e. whether republicanism is compatible with the standpoint of cultural pluralism.Footnote ⁹ He might, therefore, be more accurately described as “deliberative democrat.”

Thus, in the postwar years, German conservatives—Moses's integrative republicans—were nearly unanimous in regarding democratization as a hazardous endeavor to be avoided at all costs. This attitude was in keeping with one of the representative slogans of the Adenauer era (1949–62): “Keine Experimente!” (No Experiments!). German conservatives—whom Moses describes as “German Germans” as opposed to the “non-German Germans” represented by the redemptive-republican camp—held that it would be better to entrust political leadership to a knowledgeable, risk-averse, managerially gifted elite. This antidemocratic mindset reflected deep-seated and long-standing predispositions of German political culture.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, in order for the Federal Republic to become a functional democratic polity, it was imperative that these illiberal prejudices be overcome.

In many instances, the standpoint of the German mandarins was informed by a highly conservative, as well as profoundly pessimistic, philosophical anthropology. The intellectual origins of this framework may be traced in part to the philosopher Helmuth Plessner's work during the 1920s. In the Limits of Community (1924) Plessner foresaw that the dislocations and contradictions of modern society encouraged a fateful longing for totalizing political solutions that would end in disaster.Footnote ¹¹ Carl Schmitt, the conservatives’ spiritus rector, held that all genuine political philosophies—e.g. those of Hobbes, Maistre, and Donoso Cortes—view “man” as an untrustworthy, dangerous animal—hence the imperative nature of political authority or Herrschaft.Footnote ¹² Similarly, in Man in the Age of Technology (1957) Arnold Gehlen claimed that in advanced industrial society decision making had reached a point of hypercomplexity, or “crystallization,” thus rendering mass-democratic “input” both risky and counterproductive. Decision-making processes instead must be handed over to highly trained experts. Hence, like many conservatives of the day on both sides of the Atlantic, Gehlen viewed depoliticization—apathy at the grassroots level—as an encouraging social development.

During the 1960s Helmut Schelsky, a fraternal spirit, delivered a withering attack against leftwing proposals for a new, youth-centered education reform. Schelsky claimed that postwar Germany suffered from a grave authority deficit. Cultivating “autonomy” (Mündigkeit), the new pedagogical shibboleth, would serve only to grievously aggravate the problem. As Moses shows, Schelsky went so far as to denounce SPD proposals for progressive curriculum reform as a “danger to civilization” (145, emphasis added). In Schelsky's view, doctrines of engaged citizenship, beloved by redemptive republicans such as Habermas, risked disrupting the enlightened despotism of qualified technocrats.

Along with other German conservatives, Gehlen and Schelsky felt that left-wing intellectuals had a corrosive effect on social institutions. Among disaffected youth, their utopian aspirations led to unrealistic expectations, and thereby bred social discontent. Thus during the 1960s Gehlen and Schelsky reprised Edmund Burke's role as counterrevolutionary skeptics. It was Schelsky, in fact, who coined the phrase “the skeptical generation” to characterize the Flakhelfer age cohort who matured circa 1945. Gehlen and Schelsky believed that, with National Socialism, they had witnessed the tragic consequences of political Messianism at first hand and sought to do all that was in their power to prevent its revival—this time, as seemed likely, at the hands of the political left.

As Moses shows, many of these perspectives were reflected in the étatisme-cum-political-authoritarianism of the Münster school, as represented by the political philosopher Rüdiger Altmann. Altmann held that advanced industrial society was beset with centrifugal tendencies and adaptational challenges. His notion of the “formed society” (die formierte Gesellschaft) suggested that, unless the state assumed a leading role, bourgeois society, rent by possessive individualism and endless competition, was destined to unravel. The “formed society” became a political buzzword that began infiltrating the discourse of opinion leaders and leading politicians, such as Chancellor Ludwig Erhard (1963–6).Footnote ¹³

An analogous preoccupation with the precariousness of the social bond marked the political thought of another leading integrative republican, Wilhelm Hennis. In Hennis's view integration goal's was to preserve social cohesion in the face of widespread disintegrative tendencies. In opposition to the putatively lukewarm patriotism of left-wing intellectuals, “Hennis maintained that historical consciousness and cultural individuality performed the important function of compensating for the unraveling social unity” (98). Hennis also believed that to dwell excessively on the sins of the German past, as redemptive republicans insisted, would prevent old wounds from healing and thus in the long run prove counterproductive.

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Clearly Moses's “redemptive republicans” had their work cut out for them. In the eyes of many German conservatives, the revolutionary confrontations of the 1960s seemed a prelude to total collapse, ending possibly in a Soviet takeover. It was at this point that analogies between Bonn and Weimar became de rigueur.

By the same token, given their manifest predisposition toward political authoritarianism—Herrschaft rather than “liberty”—it is far from clear what makes Moses's integrative republicans “republicans.” Whereas, as a rule, republicanism stresses the value of political participation (one of the classical adumbrations of republicanism, from Aristotle's Politics, speaks of “taking turns ruling and being ruled”Footnote ¹⁴), Germany's leading mandarin conservatives—Gehlen, Schelsky, and Altmann—viewed political engagement with alarm and dismay. Instead, they pined for a modern version of the nineteenth-century Obrigkeitsstaat (authoritarian state), one better suited to the disequilibria and challenges of a technological age.

Of course, this was an era in which theories of political technocracy were fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic. Prominent American political scientists had similarly concluded that, in an age of mass society and the “totalitarian temptation,” political mobilization from below led to unpredictable outcomes and was thus better suppressed or avoided. As Seymour Martin Lipset observed with breathtaking candor during the 1950s, “The distinctive and most valuable element of democracy is the formation of a political elite in the competitive struggle for the votes of a mainly passive electorate.”Footnote ¹⁵

The interpretive framework Moses employs to understand German intellectuals’ response to questions of national identity after Auschwitz hinges on the categories of “stigma” and “sacrifice.” (Given the prominent role played by the Evangelical Church during the 1950s in Germany's coming to terms with its recent transgressions, this fact is hardly surprising.) Many of these ideas were already implicit in Karl Jaspers's postwar classic The Question of German Guilt, in which Jaspers urged his fellow Germans to regard the catastrophe of 1933–45 as a springboard for national and spiritual rebirth.Footnote ¹⁶ Owing to its historical misdeeds, Germany was “stigmatized” as a nation, at times quite explicitly via postwar Allied propaganda (e.g. the infamous slogan “Sie sind schuldig daran”—“You are guilty of this”). As Moses explains, often the reaction to this situation on the part of non-German Germans was to emphatically distance oneself from Germanness, either via professions of philo-Semitism or by ardent denunciations of Germany's historical crimes. The theological element of sacrifice comes into play vis-à-vis the Jews, whose martyrdom was widely perceived as a precondition for Germany's rebirth as a nation. But on many occasions, when such stigmatization was felt to be excessive, and/or morally degrading, it began to backfire as a technique of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. This occurred, for example, during the Historikerstreit, as historians such as Ernst Nolte and Michael Stürmer (but also, on the left, Martin Broszat) began to “historicize,” and thereby relativize, German crimes in order to make them seem less egregious. It was also the case during the late 1990s, when Martin Walser, on the occasion of his infamous Frankfurt Book Fair Peace Prize speech (1998), protested against the use of the Holocaust as a “moral cudgel” (Moralkeuel) with which to berate Germany unfairly, since by then its efforts to master the past had been concerted and sincere. As Moses shows, resentment of continued stigmatization also played a role in the vociferous protests against the idea of a Berlin Holocaust memorial, in which many prominent German intellectuals—Walser, Rudolf Augstein, Monica Maron, etc.—participated. They argued, somewhat disingenuously, that by placing a monument of shame in the heart of the German capital one would only encourage the anti-Semitism one sought to prevent.

Yet there was a strong sense in which internal German political developments had rendered this entire debate anachronistic, since Germany's moral and political salvation no longer depended on whether or not the monument was built. As Moses concludes, since Germany's “new patriotism was based not on continuities with the generations that experienced the Second World War but on the achievements and culture of the Federal Republic, it was possible for Germans to feel good about their nationality—their ‘we-ness’—as well as acknowledge the memory of the Holocaust” (281).

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As both Moses and Specter demonstrate, for almost sixty years Frankfurt school philosopher Jürgen Habermas—the “Hegel of the Federal Republic”—has stood at the epicenter of debates over how to interpret the German past. Habermas's debut in the German public sphere dates from a 1953 criticism of Martin Heidegger, who, some eight years after the war's end, had the temerity to approvingly invoke the “inner truth and greatness of the National Socialist movement.”Footnote ¹⁷ What was German youth during this still precarious phase of the early Adenauer years to think of such remarks? In November 2010, Habermas penned an op-ed piece criticizing Thilo Sarrazin's outmoded, Lamarckian understanding of genetics, as well as Prime Minister Angela Merkel's provocative declaration that multiculturalism in Germany had been a “total failure”—a claim that must certainly have come as a surprise to Germany's seven million immigrants.Footnote ¹⁸

Matthew Specter views Habermas's classic study in legal theory, Between Facts and Norms (1993), as the key to understanding his intellectual development. Conventional wisdom holds that the young Habermas was a participatory democrat (see, for example, his controversial introduction to Student und Politik) who ultimately abandoned his youthful radicalism for a series of less controversial, classically liberal political positions, stressing the centrality of rule of law, formal freedoms, and constitutionalism.Footnote ¹⁹ The strength of Specter's study is that it shows how Habermas, as Adorno's Assistent during the 1950s, was profoundly influenced by pivotal German debates over constitutional and legal theory. According to Specter, Habermas's mature political-philosophical ideal, to redeem the emancipatory promise of the democratic–constitutional state, was rooted in his experiences in the 1950s. In a 2005 declaration, Habermas confirms this assessment: “The interest in legal theory stems from the 1950s, as I came to know the literature, and regretted not having studied law. The ideal of a liberal turn isn't correct in my view: I was a ‘left-liberal, left of Social Democracy’ in the 1960s also. I believe that I have been true to my basic political convictions” (209).

There are compelling reasons in an intellectual biography of Habermas to focus on his interest in legal theory. In many respects, Habermas's raison d’être as a theorist was to fend off the ghost of Germany's most influential interwar jurist, Carl Schmitt, whose conservative revolutionary views had an enormous resonance for postwar German legal debates related to questions of state sovereignty, constitutional law (Staatsrecht), and the welfare state (the Sozialstaat). Moreover, several of Schmitt's prominent students, such as Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenförde and Ernst Forsthoff, occupied positions of preeminence in FRG legal circles.Footnote ²⁰ By the same token, there is no question that Specter, in opting for the legal-theory Ansatz or approach, excludes other possible perspectives. He downplays the importance of Habermas's indebtedness to the “interdisciplinary-materialist” standpoint that Max Horkheimer outlined in his 1931 inaugural address as director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (“The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”), an approach that Habermas himself would seek to resuscitate during his own years as director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Lifeworld in a Scientific–Technical Age (1971–83). Moreover, by virtue of his focus on Rechtstheorie, Specter also downplays Habermas's lifelong dialogue-cum-sparring-match with the German philosophical tradition: his ripostes to Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, not to mention influential contemporaries such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl-Otto Apel.Footnote ²¹ Needless to say, every interpretive perspective entails specific opportunity costs. Perhaps it is helpful to make them manifest, rather than passing over them in silence.

Specter argues for the continuities in Habermas's development rather than the discontinuities that have been stressed by rival biographers, such as Martin Matustik.Footnote ²² By the same token, as Specter avows early on (correctly, in my view): “Habermas has always been a democrat first and a liberal second” (20, emphasis added). At this point, one would do well to recall the subtitle of Between Facts and Norms: “Toward a Discursive Theory of Democracy”—an odd appellation for a 500-page treatise on legal theory, unless the author's central aim is to resolve a broad range of questions pertaining to the intricacies of democratic theory.

In Specter's cogent account of Habermas's developmental trajectory, the long shadow of Carl Schmitt plays a central role. Although Schmitt was officially banned from university teaching—he pointedly declined to participate in the legally mandated postwar denazification proceedings—he exerted a profound influence on a younger generation of legal scholars. Thus one of Schmitt's students, Ernst Forsthoff, challenged the interpretation of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) as a Sozialstaat (welfare state), a standpoint favored by the Social Democrats who perceived social rights as covalent with civic and political rights. From a Schmittian point of view, to saddle the state with a series of mandatory social obligations would only serve to confuse the social and the political spheres and thus undermine the state's “freedom of action.” Arguing along similar lines, Schmitt himself once claimed that, in German, sozial is a foreign word (41).

Here we encounter a long-standing dilemma of German political culture: whereas political liberals, following Kant, focused on the autonomy of the individual, German conservatives were more inclined to fret about the autonomy of the state.

Specter claims that it was the anti-normative bent of the Schmittian–Weberian lineage in German political and legal thinking that Habermas, in nearly all phases of his development, sought to overturn. “Success” could be measured by reorienting German legal and political thought toward competing Western traditions that, following Kant, viewed “universalization” or “generalization” as a standard of moral and political reasoning. It was in terms of such criteria that Kant, in the Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, defined the Categorical Imperative: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” In his formulation of discourse ethics, Habermas explicitly builds on this Kantian lineage, claiming, “Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.”Footnote ²³ But as Specter shows, Habermas also broke with a long-standing Marxist tradition that disparaged bourgeois legal and political norms as “ideological”—a deceitful moral and political facade. In Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) Habermas showed how the egalitarian thrust of these legal and political norms was central to movements of emancipation throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Conversely, as a methodological positivist, Weber held that normative or evaluative claims were not subject to rational adjudication. According to this perspective, one could not provide cogent arguments for value choices. Instead, the latter were largely a matter of arbitrary subjective preference—a “decision” ex nihilo. In Political Theology (1922) Schmitt declared that “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (“Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet”). Here, politics is not a matter of public-spiritedness or of defining the general interest. Nor does it have anything to do with matters of principle. Instead, it becomes a question of will: the ability to forcefully or emphatically decide. It is not the content of the decision that matters but the force or quantum of will with which the decision is made. Hence Schmitt's “decisionism.” The upshot of this line of thought, which had such a checkered career in the history of twentieth-century German jurisprudence, was that political themes and constitutional questions were reduced to questions of existential self-preservation: the power to decide in a state of emergency. This approach was effectively an apology for the antidemocratic tradition of Staatsräson.

But as Specter shows, already during the 1950s Habermas had strong reservations concerning the potentially depoliticizing effects of both the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) and the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht). He felt that the inordinate constitutional emphasis on basic rights structurally overshadowed questions of popular sovereignty or democratic participation, and that, given the authoritarian legacies of the Obrigkeitsstaat, this was a weakness of German political culture that demanded urgent attention rather than benign neglect. Habermas had similar misgivings about the prominent role that the Federal Constitutional Court played as the ultimate arbiter of disputes concerning basic liberties. He strongly believed that there needed to be more room to redefine their content democratically from time to time, thereby balancing the prerogatives of judicial review with the virtues of active citizenship. Habermas feared that the Court's ultimate effect on the structure of German democracy was to inhibit political self-determination and, thereby, to turn potential citizens into passive clients of the judiciary. As he lamented in Student und Politik: “One gets the impression that citizens of the so-called consumer society are also viewed juristically as customers . . . Outfitted with these rights, and as good as excluded from real political power, the people become a mere object of care [Fürsorge].”Footnote ²⁴

In the early 1980s many of these issues came to a head during the heated controversies surrounding NATO's “double decision” to station Pershing and Cruise missiles on West German soil as a deterrent to the SS20 rockets that the Soviets had implanted in the German Democratic Republic. Habermas has often been typecast as an advocate of “procedural” democracy, highlighting questions of formal or procedural fairness over determinate political outcomes. In no case was this truer than in the volatile Euromissile debate, which, in essays such as “Right and Violence: A German Trauma” (1985), motivated him to outline and refine his thinking on questions of civil disobedience. Although Habermas ultimately cast his lot with the SPD's left wing (Willy Brandt, Egon Bahr, and Oskar Lafontaine), which rejected the double decision on the grounds that, as potential first-strike weapons, the missiles were ultimately destabilizing, initially the Frankfurt school philosopher seemed uncharacteristically hesitant to stake out a concrete position on whether to endorse or reject the NATO position. Instead, in his political commentaries Habermas focused primarily on the manner in which the debate was conducted, which he viewed as of paramount importance or as a test case for the future of German democracy. His concern was that, amid an increasingly confrontational atmosphere and under the enormous pressures of the East–West conflict, the ultimate casualty would be the Federal Republic's already precarious democratic–constitutional fundament.

The protesters relied on an antidemocratic “ethic of ultimate ends” (Gesinnungsethik) by demonizing their opponents and resorting to acts of violence, which they viewed as morally justified. In a good example of rhetorical overkill, Günter Grass, drawing analogies with Hitler's seizure of power, claimed in a 1983 Frankfurt Paulskirche speech that to accept the NATO position was to acquiesce in the face of an impending dictatorship (158). Conservative politicians, for their part, threatened to abrogate constitutional liberties by rashly invoking emergency decrees and engaging in brutal acts of repression. As Specter observes, “The Rechtsstaat appeared to Habermas to be threatened from two sides: . . . lawlessness, on the one hand, and an ‘authoritarian legalism,’ on the other, that ‘draws the line’ between legality (Recht) and violence in the wrong place” (154). In retrospect, it was as though German history were frozen, Medusa-like, in a type of repetition–compulsion. The twin twentieth-century political extremes—revolution from below and political authoritarianism from above—were replaying themselves all over again. By striving to stake out a compromise view, Habermas was, as it were, marginalized in the middle.

One aspect of the situation that made the debate so challenging for Habermas was the fact that the anti-NATO protesters, led by Green politicians Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian, advocated German neutralism. As such, they risked jeopardizing what Habermas regarded as the Federal Republic's central political achievement, albeit one still in the making: Westbindung, or a firm orientation toward the constitutional values enshrined in Western political culture. As Specter explains,

Specter concludes by showing how Habermas's two related major theoretical concerns—“completing the project of modernity” and “constitutional patriotism” (Verfassungspatriotismus)—are correlated to his justification of civil disobedience in the course of the Euromissile debate. In the first case, Habermas feared that the increasing popularity of the postmodern critique of reason—which was especially prevalent among the remnants of German youth culture—would jeopardize the tenuous universalistic moral consciousness that had emerged from the ashes of World War II, as an outgrowth of the Nuremberg trials and a heightened awareness concerning the centrality of human rights. Habermas's praise of constitutional patriotism—a “thin” loyalty to the basic normative precepts of the Rechtsstaat—reflected his concern that German cultural and political traditions had been so thoroughly compromised (or “polluted,” to employ the term favored by Moses) by the legacy of the Obrigkeitsstaat, not to mention twelve years of brutal political dictatorship, that only a concerted and unflinching allegiance to principle—the principles of Rechtsstaatlichkeit—would constitute a sufficient guarantee against the ever-present temptations of a political relapse. Indeed, as one surveys the tortured political history of the Federal Republic through the early years of reunification, when pleas for a a return to “normal nationalism” were rife, one realizes how precarious things stood at times.

Specter's painstaking and conscientious reconstruction of Habermas's developmental path greatly enhances our understanding of postwar German political history, as well as that of its leading “non-German German” intellectual.