Jürgen Habermas, world-renowned as a social theorist, philosopher, and leading European public intellectual for more than five decades, is also one of the public figures most responsible for the liberalization of German political culture after World War II. This book departs from most studies of Habermas by focusing on his political and legal thought. While communication and the public sphere surely are leading leitmotifs of his life's work, they are not the concepts that best illuminate Habermas's historical significance. Rather, the dilemmas posed by the twentieth-century German experience with the rule of law and its absence provide the interpretive key that decodes the signature duality of his creative work, namely, as philosopher and social theorist, on the one hand, and as public, politically engaged intellectual, on the other. The focus of this study of the legal theme in Habermas's oeuvre furnishes a new interpretation of Habermas's intellectual career as a whole.

But Habermas's reconstruction of German political and legal thought illuminates more than just the meaning of his intellectual project. His reconstructive work on German tradition is also a window through which we observe the normative reorientation of West German political culture to a liberal-democratic model after 1945.