The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 93
Machiavelli and More; with Hobbes, a “social philosophy” mod-
eled on the new ideas of science displaced the “classical doctrine of
politics.”^14 Since then,
Human behavior is therefore to be now considered only as the
material for science. The engineers of the correct order disregard
the categories of ethical social intercourse and confine themselves
to the construction of conditions under which human beings, just
like objects within nature, will necessarily behave in a calculable
manner.^15In modeling itself on the natural sciences, a science of politics risks
treating the human being more as an object than a subject of his-
torical processes. Concern with the correct epistemology of the social
sciences was an important thread in Habermas’s work from 1961
through 1968, but it ceased to be the via regia in his work after that.^16
From 1961 to 1964, Habermas was Extraordinary Professor
of Philosophy at Heidelberg. In his other work of the early 1960s,
“decisionism” became a major category of analysis, as the essays
“Dogmatism, Reason and Decision in our Scientific Civilization”
(1963) and “Science and Politics” (1964) show. In them, Habermas
challenged the “strict division” of scientific knowledge from politi-
cal decision for which Weber was famous. Weber, he declared,
belonged to the Hobbesian tradition because in his system, “[i]n
the last instance, political action cannot be rationally grounded.”^17
(^14) Ibid.
(^15) Ibid., 43.
(^16) “I no longer believe that epistemology is the via regia [royal road].” See
“Interview with T. Hviid Nielsen,” 216. For comparable remarks on herme-
neutics, see Habermas’s debate with Gadamer, “Der Universalitätsanspruch
der Hermeneutik,” in Hermeneutik und Dialektik. Aufsätze (Hans-Georg
Gadamer zum 70 Geburtstag), (Tübingen: Mohr, 1970). Festschrift fur H.G.
Gadamer, Pt. 1, eds. R. Bubner et al. (Tübingen: 1970 ), 73–104; Habermas, Zur
Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (On the Logic of the Social Sciences), first published
in the Philosophische Rundschau 14:5 (1967); and Habermas, Erkenntnis und
Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1968 ).
(^17) Habermas,“Wissenschaft und Politik,” Offene Welt: Zeitschrift für
Wirtschaft, Politik, und Gesellschaft 86 (December 1964 ), 413. Text overlaps
with “Verwissenschaftliche Politik und öffentliche Meinung” [1963], in
Humanität und Politische Verantwortung. Festschrift für Hans Barth, ed. R. Reich
(Zurich: Erlenbach, 1964 ). Revised and reprinted in Technik und Wissenschaft
als “Ideologie” (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), TWI hereafter, 120 – 45.
Condensed and translated by Jeremy Shapiro as “The Scientization of
Political Opinion,” in Habermas, Towards a Rational Society: Student Protest,
Science and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 62–80.