416 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
Hungary and the suppression of democratic stirrings in Poland. Then
there was the quickening pace of the nuclear arms race and, especially,
the speech in which Adenauer tried to play down ‘tactical nuclear weap-
ons’ as no more than an extension of the artillery. As public opinion
became increasingly politicized, there was a growing wave of protest
against agreeing to remilitarization and the acquisition of nuclear weap-
ons as the price for achieving the integration of the Federal Republic
in the West.^20 As the only opposition party, the SPD launched the anti-
nuclear campaign ‘Fight against Nuclear Death’, which attracted not
just prominent figures in politics, the church and the trade unions, but
also scholars and writers such as the journalist Axel Eggebrecht, polit-
ical scientists such as Eugen Kogon, sociologists such as Alfred Weber,
and writers such as Heinrich Böll, Hans Henny Jahnn and Erich Kästner.
But in this instance, too, Horkheimer and Adorno gave their signatures
neither to the Frankfurt declaration of March 1958, nor to the subse-
quent poster campaign.
However, one young member of the Institute of Social Research did
play an active part in the Frankfurt protest of May 1958. The 28-year-
old Jürgen Habermas addressed thousands of protesters in front of the
Römer and criticized the logic of a ‘politics of strength’ as well as a
notion of democracy which restricted the power of the people to ac-
claiming the decisions taken by the government. His speech was printed
in the student newspaper Diskus with the title ‘Unrest is the Citizen’s
First Duty’.^21 With his call for ‘civic courage’, Adorno’s assistant put
into practice what his teacher had earlier said about the task of contem-
porary philosophy, namely that it ‘has its lifeblood in resistance’, in the
criticism of ‘the common practices of the day’.^22 Adorno had originally
put forward his theses about the aim and purpose of philosophy in 1955,
in the Frankfurt Student Union, in the context of a student study group.^23
But his past commitment to a practical philosophy of negation was not
the real or only reason why Adorno was prepared to defend Habermas
against Horkheimer’s criticism, some of it very sarcastic. Horkheimer
had his suspicions about both Habermas’s political activities and his
publications on the grounds that Habermas refused to give up ‘the
expectations of the pre-1848ers’ about ‘the sublation of philosophy in
revolution’.^24 In this instance, however, Adorno refused to allow him-
self to be intimidated. According to Habermas, he said that ‘he had
never shared Horkheimer’s prejudice against me, and he kept me in the
institute in defiance of Horkheimer’s pressure.’^25 Moreover, Adorno
could see that, given the explosive situation and the passionate debates
that were going on, it would not be possible for the institute to abstain
from comment on political issues in the long run. It was this conviction
that inspired him to take the initiative and propose that Horkheimer
should mount a series of lectures in the institute on the highly topical
subject of ‘Politics and Society’. He suggested that these lectures would
show, on the one hand, ‘that politics is a façade, an ideology, andsociety