Jürgen Habermas ranks today as the single most important public intellectual in all of Continental Europe. But he is also a formidable philosopher whose major contributions to social and political theory, constitutional law, historical sociology, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of language (to name only the fields he revisits with greatest frequency) are pitched at such air-gasping heights of difficulty and place such merciless demands upon the reader as to turn away all but the most fearless. This twofold persona—technical philosopher and public controversialist—does not strike most Europeans as unfamiliar. Sartre was such a creature, too. But in the Anglophone world it is a species that remains exotic. John Rawls, to whom Habermas is often compared, is justly remembered as the major Anglophone political philosopher of the twentieth century, but beyond the university walls his public presence was minimal. You have to go back to the early twentieth century—maybe to Bertrand Russell—to find a philosopher who achieved a similar prestige for both his technical philosophical achievements and his interventions on the public stage.

What is perhaps most striking about the case of Habermas is the way he has managed to sustain a graceful balance between these roles. His major contributions to social and political theory display a depth of erudition and insight that is really stunning. But as a public intellectual he is a muscular critic who is unafraid of polemic. How has he simultaneously managed both roles?

As the intellectual historian Matthew Specter shows in his informative new study, the answer may have something to do with the special burdens of history that have afflicted German intellectuals in the post-war era. During its early years of reconstruction, the Federal Republic labored under a constant suspicion that its democratic institutions rested upon dangerously thin supports. A cottage industry of liberal historians (many of them refugees from the Third Reich) produced innumerable volumes that set out to show how Germany’s intellectual tradition diverged from the democratic West. Allied programs for de-Nazification added further credence to the notion that the future of democracy for Germany required a break from its undemocratic past. An historical consensus began to emerge that traced the Central European catastrophe back to something deep and intractable in German culture: the peculiarity of a “Germanic ideology” or a “German idea of freedom.”

A half-century on, this genre of intellectual and political history now finds few champions. Following the withering revisionist critique laid out cooperatively by the historians David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, most historians tend to regard the notion of Germany’s Sonderweg or “special path” as merely a convenient prop that buttressed the ideological consensus of the Cold War: liberal capitalism stood as the norm against which all other polities (especially the Soviet Union) were judged defective. But in the early years of the FRG, German citizens were understandably eager to put all the peculiarities of the past behind them once and for all. According to the standard phrase, 1945 was a Stunde null or “zero hour”—a slogan that captured both the nation’s desire to forget and its longing to rush forward, unburdened by guilt, toward the economic transformations of the 1950s.

But for the younger generation of West German intellectuals who came of age in that era—Specter calls them the “’58ers”—the idea of a complete rupture with the past proved highly ambivalent. Like Habermas (who was born in 1929), they had witnessed just enough of the Third Reich to know that they had to remain forever on the watch for its ideological reprisal. The zeal with which Habermas has battled the intellectual and political forces of German conservatism over the last fifty years is a symptom of how keenly he has felt the burdens of German’s past. He is a philosopher who wishes to embrace, with full conviction, all of the promises of political modernity. But the idea of a zero-hour also left Habermas and his generation with a major dilemma. If the German political and philosophical tradition was corrupt to its core, then how was the fledgling West German democracy to survive, and upon what ideological foundations?