Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 377economic interests had to be countered by ‘the political control of the
functions of private capital’.^43 In order to achieve this it was necessary
to work to reduce the depoliticization of the masses and to strengthen
the participatory elements of democracy.
By way of underpinning the notion of political activity with theory,
Habermas drew on the Marxist-inspired model of social democracy that
had been developed by the left-wing political scientist Wolfgang
Abendroth, not least in lectures that he had delivered at Adorno’s invita-
tion in the institute in 1955 and 1957.^44 In his theoretical introduction,
Habermas defined democracy as a form of life that went hand in hand
with a free society and the maturity of its members. This understanding
of democracy was identical with the ideas that Adorno had developed
in his essays on politics and education at the end of the 1950s. The same
could be said of the observation arising from the students’ responses in
the survey that their political attitudes were characterized by a resigned
‘adaptation to what was the case’. This too coincided with Adorno’s
own interpretation of the present. ‘The totality no longer appears in
view, let alone in conceptual form.’^45 This agreement, which Adorno
himself perceived between his views and those of Habermas,^46 undoubt-
edly helps to explain why he defended his assistant against Horkheimer’s
vehement criticism.^47 He singled out Habermas’s introduction to Stu-
dent und Politik for particular praise as ‘a bravura piece’, and insisted to
Horkheimer that ‘it should remain in the book at all costs’.^48 Neverthe-
less, because of Horkheimer’s objections publication was delayed, and
the book finally appeared outside the institute series. Having seen the
warning signs, once the study of student political attitudes was finished,
Habermas took advantage of the material independence given him by
a scholarship with which to study for his Habilitation, and left the insti-
tute in October 1959. He moved in 1961 to Marburg, where he wrote
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) for his
second doctoral thesis. This book, which would make him famous, was
written under the supervision of Wolfgang Abendroth. Habermas main-
tained his close relations with Adorno while he was professor of philo-
sophy in Heidelberg, where he remained until 1964. He then returned
to the University of Frankfurt where, by an irony of history, he became
Horkheimer’s successor as professor of philosophy and sociology at
the age of thirty-four.^49
One of Adorno’s tasks as director of the institute was to gain a place
for the institute within the scientific community and to cultivate con-
tacts with colleagues in many different areas of research. This meant
that he was active not just in the German Sociology Society and the
General Philosophical Association, at both of which he gave lectures,^50
but also that he tried to establish relations with a whole series of figures
in academic life. He was well aware that such people wished above all
to promote their own academic interests, but he still thought it import-
ant to cultivate many different contacts. He corresponded with René