30 Habermas: An intellectual biography
from Heidegger.^5 The pre-Frankfurt Habermas was quite invested
in theological themes as well.^6 Open to new impulses, Habermas
did not encounter a coherent tradition of Critical Theory when
he arrived at the Institute. As Habermas recalled in 1981 , “For me
there was no Critical Theory, no coherent teaching. Adorno wrote
culture-critical essays and taught seminars on Hegel. He brought
to us a certain Marxist background – that was all.”^7 The Critical
Theory of the interwar period was largely invisible to him at the
time, in retrospect, little more than a “sunken continent.”^8
Habermas had never formally studied sociology or political sci-
ence; both were young and weak disciplines in West Germany, only
recently reconstituted after their evisceration by the Third Reich.^9
Habermas thus found himself learning the two disciplines “on
the job.”^10 In addition, Habermas was forced to become an auto-
didact in these fields owing to the fact that the theory of the state
(Staatswissenschaft) had never been central to the Frankfurt School’s
concerns. The absence of state theory in Horkheimer’s 1931 design
of the Institute illustrated the Frankfurt School’s initial preference
for social over political categories of analysis.^11 As one historian
has observed of the classic phase of Critical Theory, “The com-
mitment to society as the fundamental category [of social analysis]
implied the dissolution of political science themes into sociologi-
cal and social-psychological questions.”^12 Historians recently have5 See Matŭstìk, Profile, 19.
6 For Habermas’s youthful Heideggerianism, see Matŭstìk, Profile, 11–17; for
the intellectual formation of a “redemptive republican,” see Moses, German
Intellectuals, Chap. 5.
7 Axel Honneth, Eberhardt Knödler-Bunte, Arno Widmann, “Dialektik der
Rationalisierung,”[October 1981], in Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt/
Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 171.
8 Ibid., 169.
9 See Wilhelm Bleek and Hans J. Lietzmann, Schulen in der deutschen
Politikwissenschaften (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1999); Alfons Söllner,
Rainer Elsfeld, Michael Th. Greven, and Hans Karl Rupp, Political Science
and Regime Change in 20th Century Germany (New York: Nova Science
Publishers, 1996 ).(^10) Author’s private correspondence with Habermas, June 7, 2005.
(^11) Helmut Dubiel, Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft. Eine einführende
Rekonstruktion von den Anfängen bis Habermas (München: Weinheim, 1985 ).
(^12) Hubertus Buchstein, “Franz Neumann im Schatten der Kritischen
Theorie. Eine Bemerkung zum Verhältnis von Kritischer Theorie und
Politikwissenschaft mit drei bisher unbekannten Texten Neumanns,”