90 Habermas: An intellectual biography
historical materialism stems from the same political objectives that
drove Habermas’s critique of technocratic reason and plebiscitary
government in the 1960s, namely, an analysis of the obstacles to
egalitarian, democratic will-formation in advanced capitalist states.
The agenda he set as codirector of the Max Planck Institute extended
his preoccupation of the late 1960s with the significance of science
and technology for Marxist theory. The relevant query, therefore,
is not “What is the significance of Habermas’s linguistic turn?” but
rather, “What is the significance of Habermas’s desire to reconstruct
historical materialism?” Understanding Habermas’s reconstruction
of historical materialism depends first on understanding the West
German discourse on technology in the 1960s. Framed by a perva-
sive discourse on “technocracy,” the positions Habermas advocated
between 1966 and 1969 have a structural coherence that is apparent
only in historical retrospect. Habermas’s writings respond to per-
sistent antinomies of the discourse on technocracy, a discourse that
encompassed all political tendencies in West German society from
the far left to the conservative right. The shape of this intellectual
field is the key to explaining the frustrations Habermas encountered
and the breakthroughs he devised.
Conceiving of the discourse on technocracy in this way enables
us to map the most important tensions in Habermas’s position: why,
for example, Habermas accepted the radical students’ critique of the
“technocratic university” but rejected so much of their protest as
senseless “action for action’s sake.” It explains the intensity of his
rejection of the Great Coalition – the alliance of Social Democratic
Party (SPD) and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that ruled
from 1966 to 1969 – and of the amendment to the constitution
passed in 1968 permitting the government to declare a state of
emergency. It enables us to see how his proposition of an “emanci-
patory interest in knowledge” represents a middle position between
Marcuse’s critique of the technological state, and the embrace of
technocratic planning by the leading conservative intellectuals of
the 1960s: Hans Schelsky, Hermann Lübbe, and Arnold Gehlen.
Finally, it highlights Habermas’s inclination to seek a dialectical
third path between ideological options.
Initially, Habermas embraced the student movement’s chief
issues: the critiques of the emergency laws, the politics of the CDU-
SPD coalition, and certain reforms of the universities. Common to
all three critiques was the label the students applied to the politics