118 Habermas: An intellectual biography
a contradiction between the requirements of system- reproduction and
a “... crumbling achievement ideology.”^134 But “... who will activate
this conflict-zone is hard to predict.”^135 A society-wide legitimation
crisis could be a harbinger of a progressive movement.
Habermas went on to hypothesize that students active in pro-
test tend to come from the humanities and social sciences, where
they developed a healthy “immunity” to the technocratic con-
sciousness.^136 He described hippie subcultures with sympathy but
detachment: They were “experiments” with forms of “‘... un-alien-
ated’ group life... [that create]... sensitivity to atrophied modes
of experiencing interaction.” They aimed to overcome their atom-
ized state of “private learning” through new experiences of “group
sol ida r it y.”^137
But Habermas’s sympathy for the “New Sensibility” dried up
where the protest subcultures ran afoul of the Weberian distinc-
tion between the purposive-rational and the aesthetic-expressive. A
slogan in vogue among these subcultures – the “New Immediacy”
(der Neuen Unmittelbarkeit) – became a cue for Habermas’s interpre-
tation of the movement. The way he interpreted the hippie subcul-
tures echoes Max Weber’s admonition to the German students he
believed were immaturely “chasing after experience” in 1917: “What
is hard for modern man, and especially for the younger generation,
is to measure up to an everyday life of this kind. All that chasing
after ‘experience’ stems from this weakness; for it is a weakness not
to be able to view face to face the grave countenance of our times.”^138
Habermas framed the problem of the “New Immediacy” in a man-
ner suggestive of the future contours of his theory of communica-
tive action:
The slogan of the New Immediacy designates an attitude [that]
radically rejects adaptation to self-regulating systems in favour
of immediate gratification. [Frustrated with]... complex detours
through systems of purposive-rational action [that] continually
postpone goals... [many students react with]... the insistence that(^134) Ibid., 103.
(^135) Ibid., 100.
(^136) Ibid., 101.
(^137) Habermas, “Einleitung,” in PuH, 17.
(^138) Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Hans Gerth and C.Wright Mills,
eds., From Max Weber, 418–9.