The Making of a ‘58er 33
democracy, of liberal democracy into social democracy.”... How is
a people which is “being held in the shackles of bourgeois society
by a liberal constitution” to change into the so-called political soci-
ety, for which, according to Habermas, it is “more than ripe,” other
than by violence?^22
Horkheimer’s displeasure with Habermas’s radicalism had two
concrete consequences: First, Students and Politics was not pub-
lished in the series for which it was originally intended, and second,
Horkheimer rejected Habermas’s Habilitation proposal on the pub-
lic sphere.^23 The Habilitation is the second doctoral thesis required
of German professors. Habermas’s time as Assistent at the Institute
(1956–9) thus came to a close when Habermas left to work with
Abendroth in Marburg. Financed by a government grant, Habermas
was able to work with Abendroth on expanding the theses of his
essay on political participation: The result was Transformation, com-
pleted in August 1961 and published the following year.
Why Abendroth? Abendroth maintained close ties with left–
Social Democratic political scientists at the Berlin Hochschule für
Politik and elsewhere.^24 Relations between Marburg and the Institute
for Social Research in Frankfurt were strained, however. The
Institute consciously abstained from projects on the history of the
workers’ movement or the Marxist theory of revolution.^25 According
to Abendroth, “Adorno and Horkheimer didn’t wish to have much
contact with “... an outcast – so was I viewed by the majority of
university colleagues and the bourgeois press.”^26 For a student of
(^22) Ibid. Translated in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 554.
(^23) Wiggershaus explains that Horkheimer would have allowed him to habili-
tate with a thesis on a different subject; Adorno’s enthusiasm for the project
was insufficient to protect him.
(^24) Among them Martin Drath, Osip Flechtheim, Eugen Kogon, Ernst Wilhelm
Meyer, and Ernst Fraenkel. For an account, see the following: Hubertus
Buchstein “Wissenschaft der Politik, Auslandswissenschaft, Political
Science, Politologie. Die Berliner Tradition der Politikwissenschaft von
der Weimarer Republik bis zur Bundesrepublik,” in Bleek and Lietzmann,
Schulen, 183–212; Alfons Söllner, Deutsche Politikwissenschaftler in der
Emigration. Ihre Akkulturation und Wirkungsgeschichte, samt einer Bibliographie
(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996).
(^25) Demirovic, Der Nonkonformistische Intellektuelle, 239. Abendroth was invited
only once to Frankfurt to discuss the 1957 court proceedings against the
editor of a socialist journal.
(^26) Barbara Dietrich, Joachim Perels, eds., Wolfgang Abendroth, Ein Leben in die
Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 240.