Sociability and Its Enemies: German Political Theory After 1945 by Jakob Norberg (review)

Jakob Norberg’s cogently argued study covers familiar ground but does so in a different key. It re-examines the theory of the public sphere in the Federal Republic of Germany with an emphasis on its early stages in which the concept of sociability (Geselligkeit) played a more important role than in the 1960s and 1970s when the highly charged discussion had shifted to the term Öffentlichkeit as the key to a definition of a democratic renewal. The study unfolds this process, beginning with a discussion of the sociability project of the journal Die Wandlung and an analysis of Carl Schmitt’s responses to interrogation and personal exclusion after 1945, followed by two chapters dealing with Hannah Arendt’s critique of bourgeois society and Rein-hart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis, leading up to a new reading of Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). Norberg’s central thesis is that the concept of sociability, primarily promoted by Dolf Sternberger in Die Wand-lung, opened up the intellectual space in the early postwar years to address and overcome the catastrophic outcome of the Third Reich. This concept offered a different but familiar way of understanding social interaction after the defeat of Nazi concepts like Volk, party, state, and leader. While this approach has the distinct advantage of exploring the specific intellectual situation in Germany after 1945, it also narrows the focus and forces the author to examine the broader political discussions of the late 1950s and early 1960s as extensions of the sociability thematic. Neither in the case of Schmitt and Koselleck nor in the case of Arendt and Habermas can this be done without some losses. For instance, Norberg sets Habermas up as a defender of sociability against the criticism of Koselleck and Arendt. “Viewed against the backdrop of Sternberger’s postwar project, Habermas’s 1962 book looks somewhat like an elaborate and more academic version of an already established idea of bourgeois sociability as a transitional and educational practice for Germans on a path to a more deliberative polity” (10). This suggestion amounts to a simplification of the complex argument of Structural Transformation.

For the effectiveness of the overall argument, much depends on the way in which Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberal position is presented. Norberg decided to concentrate on the postwar years, especially on the slim essay volume Ex Captivitate Salus and the diaries of the years 1947 to 1951 in order to show Schmitt’s fierce resistance to the new public sphere controlled by the Allies from which he was completely excluded. By focusing on Schmitt’s critique of tightly controlled “free speech” and tightly supervised forms of journalistic freedom, Norberg prepares the more general argument that the liberal self-understanding of discursive equality later presented by Habermas always breaks down when the question of power and control comes up. But was it the writings of the isolated and depressed Carl Schmitt of the postwar years that impacted a younger generation of conservatives, Reinhart Koselleck among them? As Dirk von Laak has shown, Schmitt’s influence on the younger generation occurred in the context of small circles and private meetings, a deliberate counter-public sphere that shielded the unwanted conservative discourse against the intrusion of the new state and its organs. Neither Schmitt’s essays nor his diaries give us a clear picture of this counter-public sphere and the return of the German right because of their defensive and apologetic nature. As Norberg rightly points out, the diaries frequently replicate the structure of an interrogation where a conversation would have been expected. One had to go back to Schmitt’s work of the 1920s and 1930s, for instance Schmitt’s Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus or the 1938 study of Thomas Hobbes, to find the powerful arguments against the enlightenment and liberalism that German postwar conservatism needed. In the Koselleck chapter, Norberg does precisely this by stressing...