112 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Karl Marx University from May 28–30, 1968. On June 2, Habermas
took his case directly to an SDS-convened student congress in the
university cafeteria with a talk entitled, “The Phantom Revolution
and Its Children.” Habermas wrote the long essay introducing
Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (protest movement and uni-
versity reform) immediately after the Frankfurt student strike of
December 8–18, 1968, and the occupation of rooms in the Sociology
Department and Institute for Social Research of January 24–31,
1969.
Habermas’s critique in the 1967 –9 texts can be encapsulated as
follows: An “actionist” is one who engages in “... [protest] action for
action’s sake.” The actionist’s goals are nonspecific; the overriding
objective is mobilization for its own sake. The indiscriminateness of
the protest is encapsulated in the slogan, the “Great Refusal”(grössen
Weige r u ng). Targets are selected randomly. “The new techniques
of protest are directed at any phenomenon at random because any
one is appropriate for expressing rejection” of the whole.^102 Furt her,^
“[e]very calculated realization of interests, whether of preserving or
changing the system, is ridiculed.”^103 Therefore, the actionist for-
goes the concrete goal of institutional reform. Student protest could
have repercussions “... precisely where the actionists neither expect
nor want them: in political parties, unions, mass organizations.”^104
Because the actionist views parliamentary opposition as bankrupt
and “social institutions as relatively closed, conflict-free and self-
regulating, violent apparatuses,” he or she aims to make “manifest
the violence of institutions.”^105 This leads to the use of “provoca-
tionist tactics,” that is, those which “intentionally violate liberal
r u les.”^106 Habermas claimed that actionists mistake a nonrevolu-
tionary situation for a revolutionary one and thus miss the only
way to bring about “... conscious structural change.”^107 Actionism
thus represents a failed mediation of theory and praxis because it
“... generates the illusion that the situation is so ambiguous that
only tactical questions remain,” but the truth is that “... the prior
theoretical problems” have neither been resolved nor adequately(^102) Habermas, “Einleitung,” in PuH, 14.
(^103) Ibid., 15.
(^104) Ibid., 29.
(^105) Habermas, “Studentenprotest,” in PuH, 171.
(^106) Ibid., 174.
(^107) Habermas, “Einleitung,” in PuH, 49.