Habermas

The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 115

nonrevolutionary situation, Habermas considered voluntaristic and
thus dangerously close to the spiritual territory of fascism:

I ask myself why Dutschke needs three-quarters of an hour to

develop a voluntaristic ideology here, which in the year 1848 was

called utopian socialism, and which he, under today’s conditions –

in any case, I believe there are grounds for suggesting this termi-

nology – must be named leftist fascism.^118

This “game-playing with terror,” he charged, had “fascist
implications.”^119 As Habermas began to lose popularity, the left
found a less critical mentor in Marcuse.
Habermas’s concern with the problem of violence is one of the
main themes of a dialogue he conducted with Marcuse in 1968–9.
Marcuse’s lecture, “The Problem of Violence in the Opposition,”
was delivered to an audience of more than 2,000 during a con-
ference of the SDS in Berlin on July 10–13, 1967. In July 1968,
Habermas asked Marcuse to clarify a section of the essay entitled,
“Repressive Tolerance,” in which Marcuse spoke of a “... natu-
ral right (Naturrecht) to resistance for repressed and overpowered
minorities.”^120 Noting that Marcuse’s essay was written in 1965 in
the context of the U.S. civil rights movement, Habermas suggested
that the level of repression in Germany was not comparable:

Violence can be legitimately volitional and can promote emancipa-

tion only when it is enforced by the oppressive sway of a situation

that enters consciousness as something totally unbearable. Only

this kind of violence is revolutionary; those who ignore this fact

wrongfully carry the nimbus of Rosa Luxemburg aloft.^121

Although Habermas went to great lengths to maintain the intellectual
friendship and dialogue between them, he professed himself “aston-
ished” by Marcuse’s embrace of violence in his Essay on Liberation.^122

(^118) Ibid.
(^119) Habermas, “Diskussionsbeitrag auf dem Kongress ‘Bedingungen und
Organisation des Widerstandes” ( June 9, 1967), Krausharr, Frankfurter
Schule 2:128, 250.
(^120) Habermas, “Zum Geleit” ( July 1968 ) [orig. Habermas, ed., Antworten
auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1968 ); reprinted in
Krausharr, Frankfurter Schule 2:227, 444.
(^121) Ibid. Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was the cofounder of the Spartacus
League, which in 1919 became the German Communist Party (KPD).
(^122) Habermas, “Letter to Marcuse” (May 5, 1969 ), in Krausharr, Frankfurter
Schule 2:323, 625.