122 Habermas: An intellectual biography
From mid-1967 to 1969, Habermas’s role vis-à-vis the student
movement changed dramatically. More and more he felt it neces-
sary to assert the role of the sober and mature analyst who could
save the movement. This position of course estranged him from
the students who, by his own account, were the only segment of
the population that remained sensitive to society’s deficiencies. By
taking this stance, Habermas unconsciously replicated the role Max
Weber had played in the revolutionary situation of Germany in
1918–19. Weber had counseled the students that revolution would
not lead to the end of bureaucracy and domination. The state would
not wither away and usher in utopia. Politics was the “boring of hard
boards.” For those who could not “measure up to” the requirements
of mature manhood and face the reality of the iron cage of modern
life, “the doors of the old churches were still open.”^151 Habermas
identified Weber’s decisionism as a key component of the techno-
cratic conservatism that he considered the most dangerous obstacle
in contemporary German politics. Caught off guard by the students’
unfamiliar modes of protest, though, Habermas fell back on Weber’s
distinction between aesthetic-expressive and purposive-rational
action, arguing that student tactics blurred this essential difference
to disastrous effect. He viewed Marcuse’s technological utopianism,
increasingly popular with the students, through a similar Weberian
lens: Neither nature nor science could be reenchanted. Striking,
however, is the equal attention Habermas paid to the weaknesses
of the Weberian theory of modernity as rationalization. This was
embodied in his repeated recognition that the students’ “sensitivity”
toward and alienation from the work ethic were both emotionally
legitimate and politically promising.
But this movement to and fro – pro and contra Weber – could
not have been satisfactory to Habermas for long. The fact that the
theory of communicative action contains a major Auseinandersetzung
(coming to terms with) Max Weber’s legacy for Western Marxism
lends weight to this supposition. Habermas’s intellectual project in
the 1970s can be described as the effort to rethink historical materi-
alism through a critique of Weber’s theory of rationalization. This
project was already announced in the 1968 critique of Marcuse. The
theory of communicative action marks no retreat from 1968 but was
in fact born that very year.(^151) Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber.