108 Habermas: An intellectual biography
gap between industrial and developing nations, exporting misery
and mass violence along with mass hygiene. This is the symbolic
meaning American intervention in the Vietnamese civil war has
taken on in the eyes... of most German students.^83
The subsumption of the university into the military-industrial
complex, he argued, had warped the relationship between science
and politics:
A university divested of its apolitical self-understanding could have
an effect in... preventing research... from migrating to social sec-
tors outside of the university where it is used for repressive ends...
If the university were enlightened about the politics of science... it could
make itself an advocate [of evaluation of the practical implications
of scientific-technological development] instead of leaving [it] to
the criteria of the military-industrial complex.^84
The organization of teaching and research provided many exam-
ples of how universities were “interlocked” with the state: “This fusion
is the soil in which the concept of technocracy – and hatred of it –
grows and confirms itself.”^85 Habermas’s statement illustrates that he
saw the German university as the technocratic institution par excel-
lence. Because he viewed the war, the extra parlimentary opposition
(Äusserparlimentariche Opposition, or APO), the emergency laws,
and the university through the lens of the modernization of German
conser vat ism – t hat is, as tech nocrat ic conser vat ism – Haber mas devel-
oped an integrated set of theoretical and practical commitments.
In numerous essays written between 1965 and 1969, Habermas
joined the student movement for university reform, authoring con-
crete proposals and responses to governmental recommendations
that he published in high-profile venues such as Die Zeit, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Spiegel. Habermas clearly supported the
cause of university reform, writing of “catastrophic study conditions
and an inadequate organization of university instruction.”^86 He
declared the students’ calls for a “democratization” of the university
“logically persuasive.”^87 Habermas provided the foreword to a 1965(^83) Habermas, “Die Scheinrevolution,” PuH, 170.
(^84) Habermas,“Einleitung,” in PuH, 47 (emphasis added).
(^85) Ibid., 16.
(^86) Habermas, “Studentenprotest,” in PuH, 158.
(^87) Ibid.