114 Habermas: An intellectual biography
mutually confirm one another. [The two perspectives]... could mesh,
bringing about through the method of self-fulfilling prophecy what
has always been evoked: the application of naked repression....
[Thus] the protest movement must not let itself be drawn into the
foreseeable defeat of its actionistic blunders.^115
In order to avoid these outcomes, “a sober analysis is needed” of
what the protest movement is and can do. Habermas described tech-
nocratic reformers and actionist revolutionaries as opposed fronts.
But both, he asserted, misperceived the situation as a revolution-
ary one. Actionists were playing into the hands of technocrats who
would cut the prospects of radical reform out from under them. The
passage from the February 1969 introduction is a crucial one. In it,
Habermas unwittingly drew a striking parallel between the tech-
nocratic view of institutions and the actionist one. Not only were
the actionists enabling the very technocratic politics they sought to
resist, but their worldview also even came to resemble that of their
opponent. By describing the student worldview as one in which
institutions are “closed, self-regulating systems,” Habermas col-
lapsed his two opponents into one, conflating the worldview of the
technocratic conservatives with that of the radical students. Indeed,
at one point he slipped, directly naming the student activists “tech-
nocrats” (die Technokraten).^116
Finally, Habermas criticized the actionists for an alleged obses-
sion with the impregnable power of institutions that led the students
to fetishize violence. The episode in June 1967 when Habermas
notoriously charged SDS leader Rudi Dutschke with “leftist fas-
cism” is the paradigmatic example of his critique of actionism.
When Dutschke called for the establishment of “action centers”
throughout the Federal Republic that could permit coordinated
mobilization, Habermas heard in these remarks the intention to ask
students “armed only with tomatoes in their hands” to risk injury or
death. The only purpose he could see in provoking the state was to
make “... manifest the sublime violence that is necessarily implicit
in institutions.”^117 This attitude toward revolutionary violence in a(^115) Ibid., 13 (emphasis added).
(^116) Ibid., 37. Habermas’s translator, Jeremy Shapiro, translates the passage as
“The technocrats of protest in itself.” See Habermas, Towards a Rational
Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970),
46.
(^117) Habermas, “Reaktion auf das referat Rudi Dutschkes.”