88 Habermas: An intellectual biography
fellowship to the United States.^2 Habermas’s correspondence with
Marcuse explains why he went to Starnberg: First, after Adorno’s
death, “... [t]here was not much left” in Frankfurt; and second, he
was offered fifteen coworkers (Mitarbeitern) and complete freedom
of research.^3 But a strong degree of continuity in Habermas’s theo-
retical and political concerns bridges the caesura of 1969–70.
Habermas is partly responsible for this misunderstanding of
the impact the events of 1968 had on his work. In an interview
in the late 1980s, he asserted that “... my research program has
remained the same since about 1970, since the reflections on formal
pragmatics and the discourse theory of truth first presented in the
Christ ian Gauss lect ures.”^4 One scholar arg ues t hat Habermas pro-
moted the interpretation that the “real Habermas” emerges only
after 1970 and that this construction of his biography was intended
to distance himself from his origins in the Frankfurt School.^5 It
seems, therefore, that by downplaying the continuities with his
work before 1970, Habermas fueled the myth of a Habermas stung
by the ‘68ers.
Habermas’s spring 1971 Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton,
“Reflections on the Linguistic (Sprachtheoretische) Foundation of
Sociology,” do announce a new research program for which the
label “linguistic turn” is not wrong but also not terribly illuminat-
ing. In any event, the political significance of the linguistic turn
is overstated for a number of reasons. Since the turn to language
dates to at least 1966, when Habermas became one of four edi-
tors of a series of books from Suhrkamp called Theory, in which
Noam Chomsky, Gregory Bateson, John Searle, and others were
first translated for the German academic audience, his linguistic
turn cannot accurately be deemed the result of Habermas’s experi-
ences in the tumultous period 1967 –9.^6 W hile it may seem plausible(^2) Rolf Wiggershaus, Jürgen Habermas (Reibeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt
Taschenbuch, 2004), 94–5.
(^3) Ibid.
(^4) In “Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen,” in Habermas, Die Nachholende
Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990 ), 116.
(^5) See Peter Hohendahl, “The Public Sphere: Models and Boundaries,” in
Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992 ), 99–102.
(^6) Wiggershaus, Habermas, 94. The other editors were Dieter Henrich, Jacob
Taubes, and Hans Blumenberg; they published Chomsky’s Aspects of Syntax
Theory, Gregeory Bateson’s Schizophrenia, and John Searle’s Speech-Acts.