102 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Rudi Dutschke with advocating a dangerously voluntaristic approach
to revolution that Habermas labeled a fascism of the left. While
Habermas was not the only member of the older generations of the-
orists at the Frankfurt School who worried about the tactics of radi-
cal students, Habermas’s reputation suffered disproportionately.^61
Adorno had been the victim of student disruptions of his lectures
on July 7, 1967, and joined Habermas and von Friedeburg in reject-
ing the demands for university restructuring during the Frankfurt
student strike of December 8–18, 1968. Adorno and Horkheimer
stood behind the rector’s decision to call the police to expel the
students from the Institute of Social Research, to which they had
retreated after the rooms and offices of the sociology department
the students had occupied between January 24 and 31, 1969, were
closed. Already depressed by the students’ actions, until his death
in August 1969, Adorno remained traumatized by one aggressive
stunt on April 12 involving female students who bared their breasts
to him in his classroom. The correspondence between Marcuse and
Adorno from January and August 1969 focused on the differences
between the two mens’ perceptions of the students. Like Habermas,
Adorno saw them as “actionists.”^62 Habermas thus was not alone in
his diagnosis.
In the years 1965 –7, Habermas embraced the students’ causes
for two reasons: first, because they shared his critique of techno-
cratic governance, and second, because they seemed to hold the
Rechtsstaat to its own declared constitutional principles. After June
1967, Habermas continued to support many of the students’ goals,
but this fact was overshadowed by the inflammatory tenor of his
criticisms of their methods. He used language that pathologized
their worldview and tactics: left-wing disorders, infantilism, pro-
jection, playing at revolution.^63 Despite this provocative language,
Habermas felt misunderstood by the students, who deemed him a
betrayer, preferring to regard himself as a sober analyst of a delicate
historical moment in which the project of radical reform hung in
the balance.(^61) See Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas, ed. Oskar Negt (Frankfurt/
Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968 ).
(^62) Adorno, “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis”( June 1969), in Stichwörte
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1969 ), 180–2, 186–91.
(^63) See the essays compiled in Habermas, Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1969 ), PuH hereafter.