SOURCE: "Law's Reason," in The New Republic, Vol. 214, May 6, 1996, pp. 26-30.

In the following review, Posner details Habermas's central laim in Between Facts and Norms, concluding with two criticisms and two questions.

Jürgen Habermas, who is professor emeritus of philosophy at Frankfurt University and is widely regarded as Germany's leading philosopher and social thinker, was a month short of his sixteenth birthday when Hitler's Reich collapsed. Shocked to learn of the Nazi atrocities, and free from any complicity in them, Habermas proceeded through the West German university system appalled by its unapologetic continuity with the past. Its philosophy departments, staffed mainly by professors who had served uncomplainingly during the Nazi period, looked up to Heidegger—whom Habermas has sarcastically described as the "felicitously de-Nazified Heidegger"—as the lodestar of German philosophy.

From these early experiences Habermas acquired a lifelong un-German distaste for the idea of German nationhood...