The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 89
to contrast the abstractness of the “linguistic turn” he developed
systematically in the 1970s with his earlier, more obviously Marxist
historical account of the rise and decline of the public sphere, the
movement from the one to the other does not signify a movement
away from radical reformism.^7 It is not difficult to see why the
Theory of Communicative Action (1981) has been misunderstood to
signify a political retreat. It is written at a level of abstraction that
is high, even when measured against the rest of Habermas’s oeu-
vre; its systematic reconstruction of the history of social theory
gives it a scholastic air. A 1968 volume entitled, The Left Answers
Habermas, edited by a former Assistent of Habermas, Oskar Negt,
had attacked Habermas for betraying the movement. In 1989 , how-
ever, Negt published an apology for the volume that had left the
lasting impression that it was “... as if Habermas no longer belonged
to the left.” Defending Habemas against the implicit connection
between his linguistic turn and his alleged conservative turn, Negt
forcefully underscored the opposite: “The original impulse for the
language and communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas is a politi-
cal i mpu lse.”^8
Habermas’s two-volume TCA is the mature statement of his
social theory and the culmination of nearly all his work in the 1970s,
including Legitimation Crisis (1973) and The Reconstruction of Historical
Materialism (1976 ).^9 Although the book was written intensively
between 1977 and 1980, major characteristics of the theory were
developed as early as 1964–9. The outline of TCA is already clearly
discernible in Habermas’s critique of Marcuse in “Technology and
Science as an Ideology” (1968). At its core, the impulse to reconstruct
(^7) See Hohendahl, “Public Sphere,” 100–1.
(^8) Oskar Negt, “Autonomie und Eingriff,” Frankfurter Rundschau ( June 16,
1989 ). With acknowledgments to Matŭstìk for the source. Matŭstìk, Profile,
111.
(^9) Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Bd.
1: Handlungsrationalitat und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung, and Bd. 2: Zur
Kritik der funktionalistichen Vernunft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981 );
The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization
of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); The
Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique
of Functionalist Reason (1987); Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973 ); Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973 ); Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen
Materialismus (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976 ); partial trans. only in
Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979 ).