92 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Habermas did not formulate it in these terms, he seems to have
sensed that both misunderstood the correct relationship of legal-
ity to legitimacy. Attention to this submerged theme enables us to
decode Habermas’s ambivalent relationship to the ‘68ers revolution.
A major strength of the student movement, Habermas seemed to
reason, was its sensitivity to the question of legitimacy: The ideolo-
gies that legitimated society were weak. A major weakness of the
movement, however, was that the protesting students believed that
they could dispense with legality.FROM DECISIONISM TO TECHNOCRACY: 1961–4[A]nyone who is at all sensitive to politics and the political impact of
theories is bound to react to changed contexts. In the 1960s, it was
necessary to engage the theories of technocracy.^11
After acceptance of his Habilitationsschrift by the Political Science
Department at Marburg University in 1961, Habermas gave an
inaugural lecture entitled, “The Classical Doctrine of Politics in
Relation to Social Philosophy.”^12 Habermas’s central problem-
atic in the lecture was “the growing scope for pure decision”; he
suggested that the greatest obstacle to democracy was the short-
circuiting of political praxis by technocratic elites.^13 Continuing
the theme sketched in his 1958 essay, “On the Concept of Political
Participation,” Habermas explained that by modeling itself on the
modern experimental natural sciences, Western European politi-
cal science ceased to pose questions about the nature of the good
life. According to Habermas, Max Weber’s intervention in the
value judgment controversy in German social science marked the
culmination of the process in which “... the social sciences... were
completely separated from the normative elements that were the
heritage of classical politics.” In the seventeenth century, Habermas
explained, Thomas Hobbes “completed the revolution” begun by(^11) “Interview with Nielsen,” 116.
(^12) Habermas, “The Classical Doctrine of Politics and Its Relation to Social
Philosophy,” in Theory and Practice [1971], trans. John Viertel (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1973 ), 41–81; orig. “Die Klassische Lehre von der Politik in
ihrem Verhaltnis zur Sozialphilosophie” (1961), in idem, Theorie und Praxis
(Neuwied am Rhein/Berlin: Luchterhand, 1963), 48–88.
(^13) Habermas, “Classical Doctrine,” 41–2.