This dissertation proposes a new way of organizing and understanding a central intellectual debate in West Germany between the end of the Second World War and the early 1960s. After 1945, German intellectuals entrusted with re-educational tasks faced the problem of having to formulate the principles of a community that had been stripped—or relieved—of the supporting myths of a transcendent state or a stable national unity. In response to this situation, thinkers like Karl Jaspers and Dolf Sternberger searched for non-coercive and non-authoritarian concepts of social cohesion. They invoked bourgeois sociability as a viable model: individuals spontaneously build horizontal networks through conversations and commerce, meaning that basic human needs and tendencies can be relied on to generate social ties. While sociability suggested the capacity for organization without the constant intervention and management of superintending political authorities, critics such as Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, Hannah Arendt, and Alexander Kluge claimed that this was possible because of subtle mechanisms operating within the community to ensure conformity and agreement. There are, they asserted, elusive but pervasive forces within society that inhibit the articulation of dissent or eruption of conflict. Specifically, they pointed to the role that set linguistic and rhetorical patterns played in circumscribing and maintaining this social order. Their writings demonstrate that key words, fixed phrases, and generic molds for communication can direct and coordinate the thoughts and actions of individuals; they give shape to social interaction and channel joint agency. The attempt to dissolve power in society at large forced a reckoning with the structuring role of shared patterns of speech in social life. A brief concluding remark positions Jürgen Habermas within this earlier debate. His influential work on the public sphere can be seen as a distillation and re-evaluation of a preceding discussion, which in turn grew out of a response to the institutional vacuum of the postwar situation.