The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 123
Habermas’s dissatisfaction with his failure to transcend the
antinomies of Max Weber encoded his frustrations with the politics
of the discourse on technology in the 1960s. Indeed, after the sever-
ity of his critique of the students’ “actionism” and the acerbity of
their response, the theory may be read as a gesture in the spirit
of remorse. Far from encoding a defiant critique of the excess of
the 1960s, the theory represented a renewed effort to work out the
dilemma of combining legality and legitimacy – a combination
Habermas wanted to communicate that neither he, nor the action-
ists, nor the technocrats, had yet resolved satisfactorily.
LANGUAGE, LEGALITY, AND LEGITIMACY IN THE
THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
The broader links between the technocratic discourse and its crit-
ics in the 1960s and the Habermas of the TCA are evident in the
fact that most of the essays compiled in Technik und Wissenschaft als
“Ideologie” (Technolog y and Science as “Ideolog y,” 1968, TWI hereafter)
anticipate major features of the theory of communicative action.
In the 1968 title essay, for which the rest of the volume is named,
Habermas wrote that the “basic assumptions of historical material-
ism require a new formulation” to represent contemporary capital-
ism adequately.^152 H ab er m a s t hereb y i nve nt e d t he c at eg or ie s “ work ”
and “interaction” to solve a problem that arose from the structure
of the discourse on technology. “To reformulate what Weber called
rationalization,” he announced, “I shall take as my starting point
the fundamental distinction between work and interaction.”^153
The distinction between these two concepts, “work” and “interac-
tion,” enabled him to solve a conceptual problem that he thought
impaired the left: namely, the belief that a change in the mode of
production would automatically result in desirable changes in the
relations of production. He seems to have concluded that the tech-
nocratic approach of the right and the technological utopianism
of the left had converged on a shared premise: Politics no longer
required legitimation. The progress of science and technology
would lead either to the “formed society,” as the right imagined, or
(^152) Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft,” in TWI, 92.
(^153) Ibid., 60.