Between Christian Democracy and Critical Theory: Habermas, Böckenförde, and the Dialectics of Secularization in Postwar Germany

Over the past decade, philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has more or less abandoned the assumption of thoroughgoing rationalization that he had inherited from the canons of post-Weberian sociology and has come to embrace a new vision of the modern West as a postsecular society. On one hand, Habermas proposes that all citizens join together in the procedures of communicative reason, locating democratic legitimacy in nothing but the ungrounded activity of inter-subjective discourse itself. On the other hand, he joins ranks with the conservative critique of proceduralism, extolling religion as perhaps the only resource strong enough to furnish the moral substance that democracy requires. Habermas wishes to reconcile these two schools of thought through the nondestructive instrument of translation. But the viability of his proposal is questionable precisely because the Habermasian account of translation presumes a separation between semantics and metaphysics: if religion is a mere vehicle for semantic contents, then those contents can presumably be salvaged even if religion is destroyed. But if the very nature of those contents requires an ineliminable appeal to metaphysical principles then translation would prove fruitless, since it would fail to convey the very contents religious citizens consider essential. The gap between critical theory and Christian Democracy is therefore formidable. Whether Habermas can succeed in achieving a workable partnership between these two ideological traditions remains to be seen.