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The Making of a ‘58er: Habermas’s

Search for a Method

Habermas’s critical reconstruction of the meaning of the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment for twentieth-century (and twenty- first-
century) moderns is one of his enduring contributions. Habermas’s
first major work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
(Transformation hereafter), is rightly seen as marking a break with
the negative view of the European Enlightenment represented
by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 1947 cri de coeur, The
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Transformation is Habermas’s celebrated
account of the transformation of the active, critical debating pub-
lics that existed in the era of the European Enlightenment into
the passive, managed citizenry of the postwar welfare state. While
the first half of Transformation traces the historical rise of a “bour-
geois public sphere” of rational deliberation in the salons, masonic
lodges, and coffeehouses of Europe, the second half of the work
describes the decline of this sphere to the point of near extinction.
West Germany’s public sphere was in eclipse, Habermas concluded.
His diagnosis was that it had been occluded by the interpenetra-
tion of state and society. The task of Critical Theory as articulated
in Transformation was to reinvent the public sphere that once had
tamed the Leviathan of the absolutist state. Although Habermas’s
Transformation shared Adorno and Horkheimer’s cultural pessi-
mism about the stultifying effects of mass communication, it also
demonstrated a countervailing interest in the immanent critique of
liberal ideals. Thus Habermas’s book can be read as a cri de coeur too,
but on behalf of the norms of liberal society.
From where did the impetus come for this consequential para-
digm shift in the Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory?
Habermas provided us with a clue in 1989 : “I conceived it within a
theoretical framework that had been outlined in Hegel’s philosophy
of right... elaborated by the young Marx, and... received its specific