Jurgen Habermas's crucial early contributions to political theory should be grouped alongside a handful of other influential works from the same historical juncture, each of which was driven by a strikingly parallel interest in salvaging the political and, even more specifically, a vision of political action capable of countering the ominous authoritarian and totalitarian options widely embraced in the twentieth century. Schmitt is a key target not only in Habermas's early political writings but also in his latest discussions of globalization and the prospects of post-national democratization. The systematic attempt in Between Facts and Norms to draw integral links between and among radical democratization, the rule of law, and a reflexive welfare state contains significant remnants of Abendroth's original critical response to post-war German Schmittians who sharply juxtaposed the rule of law to an ambitious model of the welfare state, seeing the latter as necessarily incongruent with the former.