The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 97
conservative political affinities of Schelsky’s position would have
been apparent to Habermas.^33
In his 1963 “Scientized Politics and Public Opinion” and the
related 1964 essay, “Science and Politics,” Habermas began to
grapple with how the decisionist problematic had metamorphosed
into technocratic conservatism.^34 Habermas argued that Weber’s
formulation belongs to an earlier stage in the “scientization of poli-
tics” and that the technocratic model now was more accurate than
the Weberian, or “decisionist,” account.^35 By the “scientization of
politics,” Habermas sought to describe two phenomena that were
changing the relationship of scientific expertise to political deci-
sion: the growing scope of scientific research under government
contract and scientific consultation to public agencies. The context
for both was an international one.
In France under de Gaulle, as well as in the United States under
Kennedy, the term “technocratic” was applied to both trends.^36 As
one scholar-activist wrote in 1970, “Above all, the German tech-
nocracy discussion stood under the shadow of the reform élan of
the Kennedy clan.... Equally influential in these years was the aura
attached to the French planning bureaucracy in the flowering of
the Fifth Republic.”^37 Habermas viewed the United States as the
country in which the “scientization of political practice” had most
advanced,^38 with government-level bureaucracies and consulting
agencies directing research and development.^39 One scholar posits
(^33) Habermas had already written a critique of Gehlen in 1956: “Der Zerfall
der Institutionen,” reprinted in Philosophische-Politische Profile, 3rd ed.
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 101–6. Habermas linked Schelsky and Freyer
in his “Technische Fortschritt und Soziale Lebenswelt,” TWI, 115–6. In
TWI, he cited Gehlen, “Anthropologische Ansicht der Technik,” from Hans
Freyer et al., eds. Technik im technischen Zeitalter, (Düsseldorf: Schilling,
1965 ).
(^34) Habermas, “Wissenschaft und Politik,” Offene Welt (Köln/Opladen,
1964), 414.
(^35) Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J.
C. B. Mohr, 1958 ).
(^36) Greiffenhagen, Dilemma des Konservatismus, 54. Habermas also cites as an
influence Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1967
[196 4]).
(^37) Senghaas, “Foreword,” 6, and idem, “The Technocrats: Ruckblick auf die
Technokratie-bewegung in den USA,” in Texte zur Technokratiediskussion,
282–92.
(^38) Habermas, “Verwissenschaftliche Politik,” 131.
(^39) Ibid.,134.