124 Habermas: An intellectual biography
to a material surplus so abundant that politics would become irrel-
evant, as some elements of the left hoped. Habermas’s conceptual
shift – from “science- politics” to “work-interaction” – is the cul-
mination of his five year-long effort at engagement in the decade’s
signature debate: the noisy clash of technocratic hubris with the
students’ “Great Refusal.”
In the final pages of TWI, we observe Habermas experimenting
with his new categories of work and interaction. Habermas rewrote
the narrative of scientific-technical progress of his early 1960s writ-
ings anew in the terms of work, interaction, and “communicative
ac t ion.”
I suspect that the general relation of institutional framework (inter-
action) and subsystems of purposive-rational action (“work” in the
broad sense of instrumental and strategic action) is more suited
[than historical materialism] to reconstructing the sociocultural
phases of the history of mankind.^154
The purpose of this theoretical reformulation was to help him
solve a political problem. By splitting the concept of rationalization
into two, Habermas cut the knot represented by the convergence
of Marxist left and technocratic right: “It becomes clear that two
concepts of rationalization must be distinguished.... Rationalization
at the level of the institutional framework can occur only in the
medium of interaction itself, that is, by removing restrictions
on communication.”^155 Defining rationalization in terms of two
modes – an “instrumental” one and a “communicative” one – was
the first stage of his reconstruction of Western Marxism’s distinc-
tion of instrumental from substantive reason.
The concept of communicative action also served Habermas by
consolidating the praise he had offered the youth subcultures. It
raised to social-theoretical significance the students’ sensitivity to
the “atrophy” of the sphere of “interaction”: “By communicative
action, I understand symbolically mediated interaction. It is governed
by binding consensual norms, which define reciprocal expectations
about behavior and which must be understood and recognized by at(^154) Ibid., 92: “Verhaltnis von institutionellen Rahmen (Interaktion) und Sub-
Systemen zweckrationalen Handelns (‘Arbeit’ im weiteren Sinne instru-
mentalen und strategischen Handelns).”
(^155) Ibid., 98.