Habermas and German Nationalism

A very useful collection of Habermas texts on line can be found at: http://www.helsinki.fi/~amkauppi/hablinks.html

It is no doubt rather harsh to link Jürgen Habermas with German nationalism, Habermas epitome of decent rationalist sort of Marxist sort of left-liberal German democrat.  His thought repudiates all Nationalism in favour of cosmopolitan democratic procedures based on the ethics of discourse undistorted by the interests of power.  He devotes himself to Constitutional Patriotism, which rests on loyalty to constitutional arrangements rather than loyalty to culture, ethnicity, race or religion.  

But this becomes another form of German Nationalism?  Who has supposedly provided an example of Constitutional Patriotism? The post-war Federal Republic of Germany of course.  

Which nation reacted most strong against proto-totalitarian Jacobin Terror during the French Revolution, supposedly?  Germany of course, though one might point out that Edmund Burke pointed out this aspect of the French Revolution before it had happened.  Statist elements in Fichte and Hegel are overlooked by Habermas.  What about the consequences of Marxist utopianism in politics: totalitarianism  What about Marx's anti-semitism in On the Jewish Question?  What about the nationalist element in the thought of liberal thinker and sociologist Max Weber?  Though quite rightly, Weber would certainly think something is missing from the idea of Constitutional Patriotism,which rests on an ideal of passionless depersonalised discourse.    If we look at a great German liberal of that time, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, we find a regret for the passing of constant war in human civilisation and a strong belief in the 'Nation' as the source of laws, unified by the interplay of constant dialogue.

Humboldt has some leanings towards militaristic nationalism, along with the limited state.  His emphasis on dialogue provides a source for Habermas' discourse ethics and democracy of deliberation.  No mention of how that works out in conjunction with Humboldt.  Where is Marx, who turns a Humboldtian emphasis on freedom through dialogue into a socialism/communism where individuals flourish in their freedom from the state? 

Habermas overlooks Naziism and its place in German history while defining Germany as the home land of constitutional patriotism.  Patriotism requires more than loyalty to a constitution.  I do not suppose that Habermas overlooks the complaints mentioned above, but he has no answer other than an idealised public sphere where individuals keep debating detached from anything which makes them individual.  

Of course there is much to admire in Habermas' thought and in German constitutionalism, but we need material interests and personal perspective in an adequate theory.  We certainly do not want a universalisation to German politics, mirroring the Jacobin universalism which Habernas criticises.  

Foucault for Chance Against a Transparent Civil Society

Foucault famously suggested a historical movement from spectacular punishment to disciplinary punishment. he was referring to the transition from public humiliation, torture and execution to the hidden routine of prison For Foucault that transition from one mode of punishment to another was the indicator of a general historical movement to institutions based on the visibility of everyone in the institution, the apparent depersonalisation of power and the movement of discipline in society as a whole from moments of excessive cruelty to long periods of routinised petty cruelty.

The vision of a society dominated by the disciplinary was modified soon afterwards in a move which becomes on of the dominant issues of Foucault's work up to his death in 1984. He became interested in the security pursued by sovereign power which is not the detailed planning of society from above. In the disciplinary, we can see power trying to dominate chance and eradicate it through planning. In security, also associated with 'governmentality', and with antique notions of selfhood, Foucault finds that power may bow to chance A key example is the emergence of the Physiocrats in Eighteenth Century France. They moved away from the idea of the king's servant trying to control the economy through protectionism, state monopoly and state control of high prices. The Physiocrats displaced the Mercantilists as the leading advisers to the Crown. The mercantilists aimed to prevent tangible wealth leaving the country in exchange for goods. The effect of their policies was to hold down living standards of the majority in order to guarantee the strength of the state measured by its holdings of gold. They tried to prevent rural famine trough state intervention. Physiocrats thought fear of famine was exaggerated and that the best way of guaranteeing enough food for everyone was to keep prices down.

The Physiocrats appear in Foucault as the opposite of the schemes of the French early modern monarchs, and other European monarchs, to plan new cities and organise the lives of the inhabitants in every detail Physiocrats thought allowing people to be free and to develop their own responses. was the best prevention for famine. Allowing the price of grain to go up would prevent famine as it would create an incentive for farmers to grow more of the crop concerned.

It's in the market as something driven by chance that Foucault saw an antidote to rationalistic planning. Quite how far Foucualt was going in the direction of the capitalism of spontaneous human action is a matter of debate. What definitely comes through is not only opposition to state dominated economics but to the idea of unified transparent civil society or public sphere. With the decline of Marxism, a lot of leftist thought has resorted to notions of public sphere and civil society in opposition to capitalism Civil society is understood as defined by state administrators and actors in favour of state intervention against the looming chaos of market economics. Jürgen Habermas is the most obvious representative of such a view, and Habermas has gone beyond his Marxist background in influencing the discourse of social democracy and liberalism. His view of rational consensual civil society expresses itself in admiration for the constitutional state, which includes the European Union. Sometimes Habermas seems like the official philosopher of the EU and of Atlanticist democracy. To the disappointment of many Marxist fans, Habermas supports some US and European military operations. That shows how far he was from revolutionary Marxism, but also how a kind of low level Marxism, appealing to a rational unified ordered public sphere and civil society, guided by a constitutional state beyond passions, comes to the fore as the necessary means to resist the supposed chaos and cruelty of unrestrained capitalism. It's a convenient doctrine for academics, NGO activists and state employees across Europe and across the Atlantic world.

Foucault certainly said that society should be defended, he meant that the state should be limited, and that even the state guided by intellectuals and acting for benign motives constrains freedom and administers every detail of society in a disciplinary way. Habermas recognises a tension between the liberal goal of a state resting on general law and the welfarist pracitce of administrative action outside general law. His solution is more and more rational discourse, which in practice will be structured by the state and by intellectuals in the broad sense. Foucault's interest in what has been kept out of official and intellectual discourse leaves him with a much better sense that the willfulness of individual behaviour and the spontaneity of uneducated human behaviour in the economy is waht gurantees freedom. His account of he role ofGerman free market economists in the Odo group in opposition to the Nazis and playing a large role in the early post-Nazi German political and economic thinking, certainly suggests so.

Hayek, Habermas and Schmitt Together

Friedrich Hayek, Jürgen Habermas, and Carl Schmitt do not look like a group of the like minded. Schmitt was the legal and political theorist who emphasised that law and politics rest on the capacity of someone to make a decision.

Schmitt thought that political theory should take sovereignty as its object not the state. If political theory takes the state as an object, it becomes primarily concerned with the institutional and administrative aspects of the state. He took a critical view of confusion of the state with civil society. Where politics itself engages with civil society, the state becomes one of various pressure groups. The order and unity of the state which is necessary to the exercise of sovereignty is undermined in a pluralist view of the state. Democracy itself is not best represented by the divisive nature of parliamentary politics, since the single ruler is much better suited to representing the majority as a unity, rather than as a divided aggregate of many points of view, where no unified will of the majority can emerge. Politics also contains the dimension of struggle between friend and foe, in which we struggle to defend ourselves against the enemy who threatens our existence. Schmitt considered that to be the basis of international relations. Attempts at world confederation, and world government, can only produce new wars with an enemy who inevitably resists other countries ganging up on it.


Habermas, a Marxist in principle but more of a social democrat/left liberal in practice, condemns Schmitt for reducing international relations to this constant war which leaves no room for the just war that enforces international order. One point at which Habermas raises this criticism is when he writes on the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Habermas does not think this intervention can be fully justified by the international law as it previously existed. The UN charter strongly opposes interference in the internal affairs of member states. Habermas did not write to condemn the Kosovo intervention It is an intervention which refers to morality rather than existing law, it is the intervention based on acting as it there is a global civil society, though it does not yet exist. The intervention was not wrong, it was however a precedent that should not be taken as a precedent. Self-legislating improvement should not be accepted. Habermas talks about being between morality and law, but he is halfway between legalism and decisionism. Some force took the decision to intervene rather than follow international law, and that itself is a welcome intervention There is an Enemy, Slobodan Milosevic who must be defeated regardless of previous law. With regard to internal law and administration, Habermas emphasises the difficulties that arise from social legislation This is inevitably administered outside the apparatus of parliamentary supervision. Increased administration is inevitable for these kinds of programs The regulatory nature of social intervention must come into conflict with the universality of law, democracy is fragmenting ştself.

Hayek, the best know advocate of pure free market and an almost non-existent state, condemns Schmitt, like Habermas, always in passing He appears to be condemned but disappears before he contaminates the surrounding text. Hayek thinks democracy should be limited, or should limit itself, in order to restrict the state to state matters, including the foundation of law, a foundation which must also be an apex. The state should not be interfering in society, it should be protecting its own sovereignty from any confusion about its role. The state is most admired before the establishment of mass democracy, and is most legitimate when defending itself against enemies. There is a strong element of elitism in Hayek, who would like constitutional constraints on democracy to the advantage of property owners. Hayek's wariness of democracy follows a tradition that goes back to Humboldt Humboldt recommended the free development of the individual after paying very little tx. Humboldt also opposed democracy, because he thought that would lead to increasing social demands on the state. Humboldt thought there should be just a king, remote from and above society. That itself recalls Hobbes. Hayek, and others with similar views, attack Hobbes as a supporter of a strong state. This misses the point that Hobbes thought the only purpose of the state was to leave people to be free in civil society while defending the state against its enemies. Hobbes preferred monarchy to democracy, a monarchy of the sword unconcerned with social questions, but wielding immense force to protect sovereignty within and without.

This is all consistent with Schmitt's enthusiasm for a separation between the political sphere and the economic sphere. Hayek assumed that since Schmitt refereed to the modern tendency for society and the state to be confused, that he was endorsing that tendency, and saw in the Nazis an ideal aspect of that trend. However, there is no reason to believe that Schmitt supported the Nazis for socialsit or statist reasons. He justified the idea of a Caesar like leader, and the rights of any large nation over its smaller neighbours. That is all. Schmitt was complicit with a totalitarian state, but that should not lead us to the conclusion that totalitarianism was his goal. A post-war speech to business people strongly suggests he though that the state should concern itself with politics without interference from above in the economy.

Like Habermas, Schmitt did not think all war must be founded on existing international law. Like Hayek, Schmitt was suspicious of democracy and particularly of welfarism.
Like both Hayek and Habermas, Schmitt thought that the modern state is fundamentally lost in a contradiction between general laws and administrative bodies which regulate more and more of life.