128 Habermas: An intellectual biography
left-wing terrorism came to dominate headlines in the 1970s, and
even Brandt’s government instituted a “ban on radicals” in the civil
service that created a climate of persecution and fear, the tradition
of Critical Theory was closely scrutinized. Habermas’s loyalty to
the constitution was often impugned by CDU politicians in the
1970 s.^171
In a 1981 interview, Habermas explained the “psychological”
impulses behind his TCA. In 1977, a “pogrom-like atmosphere”
had developed around the kidnapping and murder of Martin
Schleyer, a Cologne industrialist by the Red Army Faction (RAF),
on September 5. The Schmidt government had responded to the
abduction and a subsequent airline highjacking with repressive mea-
sures that Habermas saw as unnecessary, even hysterical:
It was then [in 1977] that I first took seriously the neoconserva-
tives who had emerged in 1973.... I wanted to clarify for myself the
implicit concept of the modern and their departure from it.... That
was the one side. The other side was to [understand] the significance
of the new protest potentials, new social movements, with which I
had never had a relationship, in order to understand them better....
What interested me directly was that both had turned against what
Weber called the legacy of occidental rationalism.^172
Habermas saw himself fighting a two-front battle against
different rejections of modernity, both of which threatened to “de-
differentiate” the structure of modernity. It was a modernity he under-
stood in Weber’s neo-Kantian terms – differentiated into spheres of
rationality, each with their own inner logic, that Habermas named
the cognitive-instrumental, the moral-practical, and the aesthetic-
expressive. The neoconservatives, he wrote in 1978, unbalanced this
structure: “Whoever is willing to sacrifice this autonomy [of the
spheres] to a combination of a one-sided rationality and a vapid tra-
ditionalism, risks costly regressions: on German (blood and) soil we
have already conducted the experiment of a modernization restricted
to economic growth.”^173 For their part, the critics of economic
growth among the new social movements (peace, environmental,(^171) See Wiggershaus, “Afterword,” in The Frankfurt School and idem, Jürgen
Habermas (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004 ), 98–109.
(^172) Honneth et al., “Dialektik,” in DNU, 181–2.
(^173) Habermas, “Introduction,” Observations on the ‘Spiritual Situation of the
Age’: Contemporary German Perspectives, trans. Andrew Buchwalter [1979]
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 15.