The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 107
Finance. Together they pursued a macroeconomic policy combina-
tion of tax cuts and public expenditures on infrastructure that they
called “global steering.” This required “concerted action” among
trade unions, business leaders, and the state. Social policy began
to shift from a reactive and compensatory approach to economic
problems to an “active, society-shaping policy.”^80 For Habermas,
the most problematic aspect of this corporatism was its paternalistic
features. Also, the prospect of a neutralized SPD eager to cooperate
in reasserting German sovereignty by means of emergency legisla-
tion was frightening for Habermas. Immediately after passage of
the emergency laws, Habermas took his case to the students at the
Frankfurt cafeteria:
A stability and growth-securing politics can today only guard the
illusion of an expert-led execution of administrative and technical
tasks, because the public sphere is depoliticised. The technocratic
illusion, which justifies the depoliticization of wide layers of the
population as inevitable, is itself only possible as a result of this
depoliticization.^81
Habermas’s counterposition of technocracy and democracy
was further reinforced by an additional factor: the position of the
university during the Vietnam War. David Halberstam and other
observers in the late 1960s described the United States’ moral and
political blindness in Vietnam as the product of a technocratic
outlook, of whom Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was the
archetype.^82 Habermas was an early and outspoken critic of the U.S.
war in Vietnam, attending teach-ins such as the conference held
in Frankfurt on May 22, 1966, “Vietnam: Analysis of a Model,” at
which Herbert Marcuse also was present. In 1967, Habermas elab-
orated the interconnection of Vietnam, technology, and student
protest in these terms:
Today’s protest is directed against a society that... has not abolished
hunger in a world of potential abundance, while it has widened the(^80) F. X. Kaufmann, Sozialpolitische Denken: Die Deutsche Tradition (Frankfurt/
Main: Suhrkamp, 2003 ), 160.
(^81) Habermas, “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder: Rede auf dem Kongress
des VDS am 2 Juni 1968,” in PuH, 188; orig. Frankfurter Rundschau ( June 5,
1968).
(^82) John McDermott, “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals,” New York
Review of Books 23:2 ( July 31, 1969 ), 25–35.