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Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 61

relativism or by fear of the technocratic ‘nightmare’ of a ‘totally
administered society’. In these early essays, however, this level of
critical reflection is missing.

Habermas’s critique of scientism could, of course, be rescued
from the charge of arbitrariness by reading it in context of a
particular Zeitgeist. The student movement rejected the culture of
positivism pervading the universities and the technocratic ideology
underpinning the post-war political arena: in the FDR in particular,
the new generation rejected the idea of sweeping the horrors of the
past under the carpet of a new objectivism. But Habermas was not
simply an intellectual mouthpiece for the new generation; he was
also one of its critics, especially when he perceived the activities and
beliefs of the counter-culture to be degenerating into an anti-science
irrationalism. In its critical stance towards scientism, Habermas saw
in the student movement a potential to reframe and renew the
Enlightenment project by bringing science, morality and aesthetics
into a more balanced encounter with each other. Instead, it seemed
to adopt rebellion for rebellion’s sake, short-circuiting rational debate
on the means and the ends of the protest: Habermas accused it of
degenerating into ‘arbitrary actionism’. 12
The argument between Habermas and the leaders of the student
movement was famously escalated by Habermas’s accusation of
‘Leftist fascism’ – an ill-judged turn of phrase, by Habermas’s own
13
admission, but one which captured his horror at the sight of a
movement challenging the positivistic divorce between theory
and practice only to disavow the former and therefore maintain
the divorce under a different guise. The implications were, at worst,
anti-democratic and violent. Habermas could not accept the rejection
of instrumental reason per se and the reaction against technology.
The student movement and, what’s more, his own Frankfurt School
14
predecessors, were in Habermas’s eyes, wont to confuse the ubiquity
of instrumental reason with its mere operation. Outright antipathy
towards pragmatic discourses dealing with political strategy,
technological means and so on, was to damage rather than advance
the cause of breaking the spell that scientism had cast on the political
sphere. In the student movement, rational discourse on the means of
achieving its goals was in short supply. But Habermas points beyond
this: it is also possible and necessary, he argues, to rationalise the
process by which the goals themselves are developed. Here, in the
heat of political controversy, Habermas was articulating a core goal
that would henceforth shape his entire intellectual project: namely,

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Goode 01 chaps 61
Goode 01 chaps 61 23/8/05 09:36:26