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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2013
The term “intellectual” is a French coinage that dates to the years preceding the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, the concept has a distinguished pedigree that can be traced back to Voltaire's heroic interventions under the ancien régime—most notably, the Calas affair—as well as Victor Hugo's vehement protests against Louis Bonaparte's petty caesarism. The first intellectuals were, as a rule, littérateurs. They were interlopers who relied on the renown they had accrued in their field of expertise to hazard moral pronouncements about actualités or current events. By virtue of their literary or scientific prestige—or, to use a contemporary locution, their “cultural capital”—they hoped to shame the political authorities into rectifying a gross miscarriage of justice. As Jean-Paul Sartre once put it, intellectuals are “those who involve themselves in matters that are none of their business.”
1 See Charle, Christophe, Naissance des intellectuels (Paris, 1990)Google Scholar.
2 Cited in Winock, Michel, “A quoi servent (encore) les intellectuels?” Le Débat 110 (2000), 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; emphasis added.
3 See Brunkhorst, Hauke, Der Intellektuelle im Lande der Mandarine (Frankfurt, 1987)Google Scholar.
4 See Michael Slackman, “Book Sets off Painful Immigration Debate in Germany,” New York Times, 2 Sept. 2010.
5 Specter points out, for example, that the “58er” label poses a nice contrast with the 68ers, that Habermas's mature intellectual concerns date from the 1950s rather than the 1940s, and that Habermas's generation only began to make its mark in the German public sphere during the late 1950s (7).
6 “West German democracy was a discursive achievement, not an integrative or republican one” (50).
7 Arendt, Hannah, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Arendt, , Essays in Understanding (New York, 1994), 121–32, 184Google Scholar.
8 For the locus classicus of this argument see Ritter, Gerhard, Das deutsche Problem (Munich, 1962)Google Scholar.
9 Habermas, Jürgen, “Three Models of Democracy,” Constellations 1/1 (1994), 1–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 For an excellent survey of these attitudes see Sontheimer, Kurt, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1968)Google Scholar.
11 Plessner, Helmut, The Limits of Community, trans. Wallace, A. (Amherst, NY, 1999)Google Scholar.
12 See Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, 2007), 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “The ultimate question is whether man is a dangerous or an undangerous being, a perilous or a harmless, nonperilous being. All genuine political theories presuppose man's dangerousness.”
13 As Moses points out, for a time Altmann served as Erhard's political adviser.
14 “In most cases of rule, the statesmen, it is true, people take turns at ruling and being ruled, because they tend by nature to be on an equal footing and to differ in nothing.” Aristotle, Politics, I, 1259b5–9.
15 Lipset, Seymour M., Preface to R. Michels, Political Parties (New York, 1962), 37Google Scholar.
16 Moses cites the following apposite remark by Jaspers: “Either acceptance of the guilt not meant by the rest of the world but constantly repeated by our conscience comes to be a fundamental trait of our German self-consciousness—in which case our soul goes the way of transformation—or we subside into the average triviality of indifferent, mere living” (280).
17 See Wolin, Richard, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 178Google Scholar; compare Specter, Habermas, 92.
18 Jürgen Habermas, “Leadership and Leitkultur,” New York Times, 28 Oct. 2010.
19 Habermas, Jürgen, Student und Politik (Neuwied, 1961)Google Scholar.
20 For the best discussion of Schmitt's influence see van Laak, Dirk, Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens (Berlin, 1992)Google Scholar.
21 For a similar critique see Peter Gordon's review of Specter's book, “Up from Zero Hour,” the New Republic (The Book), 17 Jan. 2011.
22 Matustik, Martin Beck, Jürgen Habermas: A Political-Philosophical Profile (Totawa, NJ, 2001)Google Scholar.
23 Habermas, Jürgen, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Nicholsen, S. (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 66Google Scholar. The key difference between Habermas and Kant in this regard is that whereas Kant's categorical imperative assumes the character of an individual thought experiment, Habermas stresses the importance of an intersubjective, public discourse.
24 Habermas, Student und Politik, 39, cited in Specter, Habermas, 68, emphasis added.