64 Habermas: An intellectual biography
plebiscitary distortion of democracy. Habermas’s critique was aimed
at what he called the “social-technical” view of democracy, of which
U.S. political science was its “prototypical” version.^27 Habermas
argued that the “new [American] democracy research” reduced
democracy to a method for securing social equilibrium.^28 His exam-
ples included the arguments of Morris Jones, David Riesman, and
Nathan Glazer that a certain measure of apathy was a stabilizing
force in democracies. By isolating political participation as sim-
ply one factor in achieving a stable polity, he argued, they missed
its normative centrality: “Therein is forgotten the idea of the rule
of the people in the form of direct democracy.”^29 The hegemony
of American political science left a gap that the postwar writings of
Franz Neumann seem to have filled for Habermas.
Habermas’s efforts to rethink the meaning of democracy show
clear debts to Neumann’s essays, especially his “The Concept of
Political Freedom” [1954]. Habermas’s critique of Harold Lasswell’s
writings, for example, is clearly anticipated by Neumann’s views,
expressed just five years earlier: “The dominant path in American
political science, but modern political science in general, is the...
tendency to equate politics with power politics (Machtpolitik)... and
to conceive politics as a purely technical affair.”^30 Neumann had
argued that this view stemmed from Machiavelli: “Values appear as
subjective preferences, valid when they bring success, invalid when
they don’t,” with the result that history appears meaningless, an “...
indifferent repetition of endless struggles between ‘in groups’ and
‘out groups.’”^31 Habermas’s critique also echoed Neumann’s critique
of the elitism and cynicism of much democratic theory:... [P]essimistic theories [such as] Machiavelli’s view of politics [or]
Metternich’s conception of foreign relations are... unquestionably
fashionable today, and if contrasted with a shallow misinterpretation
of Enlightenment philosophy they are certainly more realistic.
(^27) Habermas, Students and Politics, 11.
(^28) Ibid.
(^29) Ibid.
(^30) Franz Neumann,“Ansätze zur Untersuchung politischer Macht,” in
Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat: Studien zur politischen Theorie, ed.
Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1967), 83; The Democratic and
Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. and trans. Herbert
Marcuse (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957 ).
(^31) Ibid.