The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 95
He corroborated this in a 1981 interview, attributing his interest in
the pragmatists to an effort to compensate for the “democratic the-
ory deficit in Marxism.”^22 Beginning in the early 1970s, some West
German scholars began to characterize the conservative ideologies of
t he 1960 s as a new a nd d ist i nc t version of G er ma n conser vat ism.^23 I n a
1970 volume explicitly devoted to the topic, the editors wrote that the
concept of technocracy had evolved from a concept unknown outside
of small sociology circles in 1960 to one frequently used by represen-
tatives of the student movement and in reportage.^24 In essays written
between 1964 and 1968, Habermas directly engaged these theories.^25
The technocracy thesis provided a new occasion to refine his cri-
tique of plebiscitary tendencies within democracy. To recapitulate
an earlier piece of the argument about the 1950s made in Chapter 2 ,
Habermas shared the belief of West German legal conservatives such
as Huber, Forsthoff, and Weber that the state was “overburdened”
by the demands of civil society. The next generation of conserva-
tives creatively converted this pessimistic analysis into an optimis-
tic prognosis: The technocratic state would provide the means for
circumventing the consensual dimension of political organization.^26
The decisionist problematic of the 1950s thus metamorphosed into
the technocracy discussion of the 1960s.
The discussion began with an influential 1961 lecture, “Man in
Scientific Civilization,” by sociologist Helmut Schelsky. Schelsky
asserted that “[m]odern technology requires no legitimacy; with it,
(^22) Axel Honneth et al., “Dialektik der Rationalisierung,” in DNU, 167–208.
(^23) See Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in
Deutschland (München: Piper, 1971 ); Helga Grebing, Konservative gegen
die Demokratie: Konservative Kritik der Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik
(Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971); Hans Jürgen Pühle,
“Konservatismus und Neo-Konservatismus: Deutsche Entwicklungslinien
seit 1945,” in Konservatismus – eine Gefahr für die Freiheit? Festschrift für
Iring Fetscher zum 60. Geburtstag, eds. Eike Hennig and Richard Saage
(München and Zürich: R. Piper, 1983 ), 409.
(^24) Claus Koch and Dieter Senghaas, eds. Texte zur Technokratiediskussion
(Frankfurt/Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1971 [1970]), 5–12.
For more on the technocracy debate, see Technokratie als Ideologie:
Sozialphilosophische Beiträge zu einem politischen Dilemma, ed. Hans Lenk
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973).
(^25) Habermas, “Technischer Fortschritt und soziale Lebenswelt,” Praxis
(Zagreb), Heft 1–2 ( 1966 ), 217–28, reprinted in TWI, 104–19; “Technik und
Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie,’ ” Merkur, Heft 243 ( July 1968), 591–610 and
Heft 244 (August 1968 ), 682–93, reprinted in TWI, 48–103.
(^26) Compare with Thornhill, Political Theory, 135.