The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 91
they rejected: “technocratic.” The technocracy theorists advanced
the argument that scientific progress had created a “technical
state” in which major decisions would be made by experts rather
than politicians and that the state apparatus was sufficient to solve
all problems of social conflict and distribution. Like the students,
Habermas viewed the organization of research and instruction at
German universities as a paradigm case of the technocratic form of
“domination.” The students also saw Chancellors Ludwig Erhard
(1963–6) and Kurt Georg Kiessinger (1966–9) as committed to tech-
nocratic Keynesian economic strategies. In the students’ critique of
technocracy, Habermas heard a kindred analysis of the plebiscitarian
distortion of democracy. But soon Habermas realized that the image
of the state put forward by student radicals resembled nothing so
much as the image of the state put forward by the technocrats them-
selves. Trapped between a governing regime he saw as technocratic,
on the one hand, and an opposition that was too unreflectively activ-
ist and antitechnology, on the other, Habermas turned to the ques-
tion of the relationship of scientific expertise to political practice
thematized by Max Weber in his famous lectures of 1917 and 1918.
Faced with visions of technological utopia on both the left (Marcuse)
and the right (the technocratic conservatives), Habermas sought new
ways to think about the relationship of technology and democracy.
In 1970, Habermas’s student, Claus Offe, described the recent
intellectual convergence between technocrats and students.
Political science since Max Weber, Offe wrote, had recognized
the dual basis of domination in the “objective” dimension of power
and the “subjective” dimension of belief in the legitimacy of rulers.
Domination in a democracy was unthinkable without at least the
toleration, if not the consent, of the ruled. But this view, accord-
ing to Offe, “... is now placed in question by some critical perspec-
tives in the analysis of late capitalist societies as also on the other
side by the conservative representatives of the technocracy-thesis.”^10
Offe’s formulations attest to a phenomenon Habermas had seen
earlier: The actionism of the students and the technocracy of the
intellectuals appeared to be mirror images of each other. Although
(^10) See Offe, “Das politische Dilemma der Technokratie,” in Texte zur
Technokratiediskussion, eds. Claus Koch and Dieter Senghaas. (Frankfurt/
Main: Europäische Verlaganstalt, 1970), 158. Political scientist Claus Offe
completed his doctorate in sociology with Habermas in 1968.