87

The political protest campaigns of the 1960s were the crucible
in which Habermas’s theoretical commitments of the 1970s were
forged, but not in the way it is usually imagined. The received pic-
ture of the impact of 1968 on Habermas is the following: “[As]...
the student movements overtake the mainstages of Paris, Berlin
[and elsewhere],... [Habermas] gradually devolves from an intel-
lectual leader of the progressive German left into a reform-minded
German professor, formal philosopher (more neo-Kantian and
Hegelian than Marxian), and legal scholar.”^1 Burned by encounters
with leftist students who saw him as a betrayer of their movement,
Habermas thus is supposed to have retreated into the development of
a formal theory of communication. The image of a theorist in retreat
is nourished by his professional move from the public University of
Frankfurt to the more protected ivory tower environment of the
Max Planck Institute, an institution devoted solely to academic
research. In 1970, he assumed the codirectorship of the Max Planck
Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical Conditions of the
Lifeworld in Starnberg.
However, Habermas did not retreat or recoil from a more leftist
theoretical position into the theory of communicative action. The
years 1969–70 marked a significant caesura in German politics and
intellectual life generally. Habermas’s former mentor, Theodor W.
Adorno, died in August 1969 , and Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Adorno’s
leading pupil and outspoken theoretician of the student revolution,
died in an automobile accident in February 1970. Other close col-
leagues of Habermas all left Frankfurt: Ludwig von Friedeburg left
for a position in the administration of Hesse in 1969, Oskar Negt
took an academic position in Hannover, and Claus Offe set off on a

3

1961–1981: From the “Great Refusal”

to the Theory of Communicative

Action

(^1) Matustìk, Profile, 93.