Page 92 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

2 Moral Development

and Ego Identity

In July of 1974, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the Institut
fitvy Sozialforschung in Frankfurt arranged a series of lectures to which
Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Oskar Negt, Alfred Schmidt, and
Jiirgen Habermas contributed. This is the text on which Habermas’ lec-
ture was based.

Since the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute has been immedi-
ately embodied in the lectures by Marcuse and Lowenthal and has
been made present in two essential aspects by contributions from
representatives of the postwar generation, I feel myself absolved
from duties that the occasion of this anniversary would other-
wise have imposed. In other words, I shall not be delivering a
ceremonial address. Moreover, the state in which critical social
theory finds itself today—if one compares it with its now classi-
cal expressions—gives no occasion to celebrate. Finally, there is
a systematic reason for being somewhat sparing with tributes to
the past: the members of the original institute have always felt
themselves one with psychoanalysis in the intention of breaking
the power of the past over the present; to be sure, they have tried
to realize this intention, as psychoanalysis does, through future-
oriented memory.