Habermas

116 Habermas: An intellectual biography

While some scholars have pointed to a reflexive fear of violence

as the explanation for his dramatic outburst, Habermas actually did

not disavow all violence in principle. “There is a progressive role

for violence, and the analytical distinction between progressive and

reactionary violence has a real sense.”^123 The distinction between

violence and nonviolence therefore was secondary to his distinction

between reform and revolution. What made the students’ actions

flawed was not the turn to violence per se, but rather the fact that

students were neither a class nor the avant-garde of a revolution.^124

“The only way I see to bring about conscious structural reform in

a social system organized in an authoritarian welfare state is radi-

cal reformism,” he declared.^125 Under contemporary conditions, the

categories of reform and revolution were not sharp antinomies.

Reformism could and should be radical.^126

Revolutionary student protestors often disregarded liberal

rules and engaged in violence. Their departure from legality put

Habermas in a double bind: Affirm the legality of the bourgeois

constitution and sacrifice what he saw as democracy’s best hope for

the future, or affirm the legitimacy of the revolution and forfeit

democracy’s best achievement to date – the rule of law. Habermas’s

critique of actionism thus can be read as an immanent critique of

the student movement: He envisioned a radical reformism that

could combine the legitimacy of revolutionary élan with the legality

of the constitution.

TECHNOCRACY, TECHNOLOGICAL UTOPIANISM, AND THE

IDENTIFICATION OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN INTERESTS

Key tensions existed within Habermas’s positions on technology,

technocracy, and “the technical,” however. A statement from his

February 1969 essay illustrates the problem. On the one hand,

(^123) Habermas, “Reaktion auf das referat Rudi Dutschkes” ( June 9, 1967),
Krausharr, Frankfurter Schule 2:130, 254.
(^124) Habermas “Über einige Bedingungen der Revolutionierung spätkapitalis-
cher Gesellschaften 1968,” in idem, Kultur und Kritik: Verstreute Aufsätze
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 70–86. Originally based on a lecture
at the Korcula Summer School in August 1968 and published in Praxis
(Zagreb) 5 (1–2), 212–23.
(^125) Habermas, “Einleitung,” in PuH, 49 (emphasis added).
(^126) Ibid.