The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 121
no longer understands why... the institutionalized struggle for
existence, the discipline of alienated labor, or the eradication of sen-
suality and aesthetic gratification should be perpetuated – why in
short, the mode of life of an economy of poverty is preserved under
conditions of a possible economy of abundance.^148Thus Habermas came to his second conclusion: While Marcuse and
the students inclined toward this vision of a technologically real-
ized plenitude, Habermas reasserted the primacy of the institutional
framework of decision, choice, and practical deliberation. Although
he did not explicitly frame his interventions this way, it appears
that Habermas found his way theoretically by identifying a middle
path between the technocratic right and the Marxist left: “Today,
better utilization of an unrealized potential leads to improvement
of the economic-industrial apparatus, but no longer eo ipso to a
transformation of the institutional framework with emancipatory
consequences.”^149 In other words, the mere fact of a technological
surplus did not prescribe the conditions for its use. Where Marcuse
seemed to Habermas to have envisioned an automatic translation
from a change in the mode of production to a change in social rela-
tions, Habermas considered this a mechanistic reading of Marx that
formed a disturbing echo to the technocratic erasure of the practical-
political sphere. In a footnote to another essay from Technology and
Science as an Ideology, Habermas went still further in linking tech-
nocratic right and Marxist left: “Marcuse analysed the dangers of a
reduction of reason to technical rationality and a reduction of society
to the dimension of technical execution in his book, One-Dimensional
Man. In another context, Helmut Schelsky put forward the same
d iag nosis.”^150 That Habermas could equate Marcuse’s revolutionary
stance with Schelsky’s technocratic conservatism is remarkable for
two reasons: First, it shows how saturated Habermas’s thinking
was in the middle to late 1960s by the discourse on technology and
technocracy. Second, his discovery of a hidden affinity of Marcuse to
Schelsky seems to have spurred him to work out a theory of rational-
ity beyond technical rationality. This was the founding gesture of
Habermas’s reconstruction of historical materialism via Weber and
Western Marxism – his major project of the 1970s.
(^148) “Flugblatt der Berliner SDS-Gruppe,” 264–5.
(^149) Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft,” in TWI, 99.
(^150) Habermas, “Erkenntnis und Interesse”[ 1965 ], in TWI, 167.